Grief Beyond Comprehension

There are no right words.

I just spent over 30 minutes holding my 7yo (Squishy) as he completely, flat-out lost it. He cannot understand why the very morning he woke up, ready to leap out of bed and come ask me if he could visit his best friend because he had a hug to give him, I told him, instead, that his best friend had died. [For backstory, simply do a google search for the hashtags #hopeforhollis/#hopethroughhollis or the phrase ‘Hollis Doherty DIPG’…]

“I heard the words you were saying, but I was in shock. I was just completely shocked, and I didn’t know what to say. When I went to first recess, after I left daddy’s room and set my backpack down, when I was walking down the ramp to the playground, I couldn’t even think what to say or do. I wanted to lie down on the ground and cry until an ocean of tears filled up the school.”

He has ‘enough tears to fill the whole house’ inside of him every day, and tonight, when Mark Schultz’s He’s My Son came up on the iPod, it was too much for him to bear one second longer. After a half hour of sobbing, pleading, desperate questions, and anguish, he wanted me to squeeze him tight because his heart was literally in such extreme pain that he couldn’t breathe. And I’m not using literally when I mean figuratively. He was gasping and pressing on his heart, begging for an ice pack to take the pain away. All he keeps asking is why, why, why. And please, can’t he just have one more day because now that hug is wasted and has nowhere to go.

“If I could just kill myself right now, then I would be with Hollis and I would hug him and never let him go. Mom, you can’t understand how much it hurts because there aren’t enough words to tell you. You can’t comprehend it. It would go on for infinity, until the world ended and then the numbers would have to stop. But if I die, now, it won’t hurt, anymore. I feel like Saul [Paul] when he wanted God to take the thorn out but God said no and I’ve begged and begged and God won’t take the thorn out of my heart and I just can’t take it anymore!”

I knew this had been hard on him, but I didn’t know it was this bad. My heart is a lead balloon in my chest. My stomach feels like I’ve eaten glass.

Squishy knows that God is in control. He knows that immense and glorious connections were made throughout the entire world because of Hollis’s incredible fight for his most, best days. But right now, none of that is enough to satisfactorily explain to him any sort of answer.

“But why did God have to make him die? Why couldn’t His glory be with Hollis alive? Why did He have to take him away on the same day I needed to hug him? Why didn’t God know? What am I supposed to do, now?”

This post is a mess and I’m sorry. I haven’t said a peep on here in over 16 months, and I’m sorry. But my Squishy, my little sunshine – his heart is crumbling to pieces & I have no clue how to ‘fix’ it, and for that, I am most sorry of all.

a tiny forget-me-not