The Laundry
The Laundry.
I wanted to share a little bit about my walk of faith. I was not a very faithful person a couple of years ago. I believed that people with blind faith in God were feeble minded. I felt like the faithful used God and the devil interchangeably to fit whatever turn their life had taken for the moment. Evil represented to me an excuse for not owning up to one’s own actions, the old “the devil made me do it”. The blessings of life were earned and owed to those who deserved them. I felt hypocritical attending church, and could only concentrate on the people I considered hypocrites around me when I went. The Catholic religion seemed antiquated and did not reach me on a spiritual level anymore. I had chosen to let go of God, and the guilt and obligation that came with organized religion. I decided that when we died, that was it. Our life was gone, and our remains were swallowed up by the Earth. I found it somewhat narcissistic to imagine that a piece of each of us lived on after our physical death. But that was then….
All of this changed for me in the instant that I lost my child. Suddenly, I wanted and needed to believe in an afterlife. There had to be more. We did not just die. I began to feel Lauren’s spirit with me even though her physical body was gone. I found myself having to believe in God again to believe in Lauren. With that small seed, my faith began to grow, but it was an uphill battle. I was still angry. I wanted to believe for selfish reasons, and my pride made me feel hypocritical. I felt horribly guilty. I was frightened that I had willed this to occur because of my lack of faith, and my letting go of God.
When Lauren died, the pain of grief was all encompassing, with no possible sign or hope of relief for the rest of my life. My pain was absolutely too great to bear. It threatened to swallow me whole every second of the day. People would come to me and make every faith based comment you can imagine. I took their words as kind gestures, but had little faith in a God that would punish me and my family and my beautiful daughter in this way. About two weeks after Lauren died I sunk into the deepest abyss of grief. I had ended up with a whole load of Lauren’s laundry that day. I had washed it, dried it, folded it, and now I had to put it away. That was the final straw, and I fell apart. I didn’t know what to do with her clothes. I tried to put them in her dresser, but I got angry. What was the point? She would never wear them again. I began to shake with rage from within. I threw her clothes into the bottom of her closet and I slammed the door. I cried like I have never cried before. Eventually, I retreated to my chair upstairs and I sat in a catatonic state for the next few hours, staring straight ahead at the wall. I was finally numb. I had found a place within myself to retreat, and I didn’t care if I ever came out. I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t care about living, and I didn’t care about my family anymore. All I wanted was out of reality, and out of the hell my life had become.
Terry would not let me stay there as bad as I wanted to. He pushed me to get up. He reminded me that London and TJ did not ask for this pain in their lives either, and that they needed us to help them through this as much as we needed them to help us. I found the strength to get up, and I decided to pray a rosary. At this point, I wasn’t sure about Jesus, I was angry and upset with God, and Mary was the only one I would consider opening my broken heart to. She was the only one who could possibly understand my pain. I prayed the rosary by myself for the first time in a very long time, and I prayed as hard and as fast as I could. When I got to the end of the rosary, I sat back in my chair, I closed my eyes, and I felt the gentle breeze blowing on my face. I found momentary peace. I learned to pray the rosary whenever I became overwhelmed, and it gave me peace, and it still does, like nothing else.
I reflect on Lauren’s last load of laundry often. It was a turning point for me. That moment when I stood at her open dresser drawer, with an armload of her clothes, was when I accepted that she wasn’t coming home. Her laundry made me face the fact that it didn’t matter what I did with that stack of clothes, because she was never going to wear them again. In many ways it hurt more than going through all the motions, the accident scene, the funeral, the surreal life I had been living. It was the practical acceptance of the end of her life. It was me, alone with myself and her useless clothes, and the reality that she was gone. On that day, my anger cast me into the deepest pits of grief. I literally had to claw my way out of despair and find one good reason to keep going. I had found that place within myself that I could retreat to, and shut all the pain out, and it was very tempting to stay there. I learned to pray that day, and I learned the power of prayer in my life. Prayer brought me peace when I needed it most. I decided to believe, and my life was changed.
At the end of that day, I quietly returned to Lauren’s room. I could not rest with her stuff thrown in the closet like that. I opened her closet and I pulled out the stack of clothes and lovingly refolded each piece. I opened her dresser drawers and I put her clothes away, knowing that it would be the last time. I went back to the closet to close the door, and when I glanced down, I found a frog! It was a silly red frog with a crown and it was smiling up at me from the floor of her closet. The sight of it made me laugh and cry at the same time. My heart swelled with such emotion, I thought it would surely burst. I had taken a leap of faith that day, and I had made it to the other side, and Lauren let me know.
Tara Rodney
6/27/11
