Christmas

Faint remarks of adjacent occupants mellow with the clicks of my keyboard as Bob snores on the patterned carpet below. This is Christmas.

Keith is at the gym downstairs (solely for mental health at this juncture)

and we're in Houston, cozied in a rental, as we await our immigration into Costa Rica on New Year's Eve.

Major downsizing has happened (again),

Plane tickets to Central America have been purchased,

Rental agreements have been asserted,

Immigration lawyers have been retained.

So much has happened since Olivia's death,

Internally,

Externally,

Within family,

Amongst friends,

Spiritually,

And now geographically.

What Keith and I've experienced (and witnessed) is enough to fill a book-

and so I shall.

He and I are different now.

Changed.

Those that knew us before Olivia's death

and those that have seen us since, can attest to this.

Reactions from others have been a mixed bag.

They've come in the form of sympathetic and supportive remarks from those who've seen our transition and welcome the new,

but they've also come in the form of misunderstanding and disappointment.

I have an association that comes to mind when thinking of the landscape of our shared experience.

It's that of three soldiers.

They have fought a long war together,

a five year grisley war,

only to have one soldier die in battle while the other two held the one, helpless.

I don't suppose that we'd assume the two soldiers remaining to come back to their previous life unscathed, if at all.

We'll accept a PTSD diagnosis for an adult soldier who has chosen to enlist,

But for the involuntary victims of child death,

especially when the diagnosis is both critical and terminal,

We utter words like,

"You're too sensitive."

"It's time to get back to living."

"They wouldn't want you to be sad ."

We put expectations like,

Phone calls,

Holidays,

Explanations.

Family and friends that make up our societies quizzically scratch their heads,

and count down the days 'til an old sense of normality can return to the family unit,

an imagined sense of equilibrium and control.

It's been two years since Olivia's death,

and I'm proclaiming to you that any ideas of control within mankind (for us) have been irrevocably shattered.

Wars, and genocide.

Compulsive consumerism (to which Keith and I've lived as slaves),

extreme famine and poverty assigned by birthright...

down to the anger and division within our own households,

to which we expertly apply social media to filter out hues of apathy and avoidance.

Keith and I've quizzically been asking in response, Come back to what?

We had the American Dream.

• Six figure income

• Dream home

• Multiple vehicles.

• 60-80 hour work weeks

• Full benefits, medical, dental, vision

• On track to retire millionaires...

And yet, our daughter is dead.

So, I'll ask society formally (on behalf of Keith and I)

Come back to what?

Society,

We cannot come back.

Loved ones, please understand,

As Olivia cannot come back to us,

We cannot come back to the old way.

Not to the way that it was.

Not to the old dynamics.

Old Shalamar and Keith are no-longer.

They have been crucified.

There's an account in the Bible that speaks of three young Hebrew men named Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who refused to bow down to Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar in 595 B.C. In response, the tyrant King demanded that they be thrown into a furnace with temperatures so outrageous that the men throwing them in perished...

What is proclaimed in Daniel 3, after the boys are thrown in,

sends quivers into my spirit.

24 "Then King Nebuchadnezzar leapt to his feet in shock and asked his advisers, “Weren’t there three men that we tied up and threw into the fire?”

They replied, “Certainly, Your Majesty.”

25 "He said, “Look! I see four men walking around in the fire,

unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of god.”

In a similar way, you needn't be afraid for us.

We don't have a five-year plan.

We don't need a five year plan.

Olivia was our five-year plan.

What we have now is much more valuable to Keith and I, and it's how we've been operating for two years: Faith.

Faith that like those men thrown into the furnace, God is, and will be with us.

As the analogy of the soldiers is true for Keith and I,

there was a fourth in the foxhole on the night of Olivia's death.

We've come to understand that the fourth person was the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

We're convinced that we'll see Olivia again, no matter how much we despair for her here...

And Keith and I've been irrevocably changed by the God that continues to show up for us,

again and again.

A sincere Merry Christmas,

From the Foxhole.

Photo Description: Olivia, dressed in blue, caresses Santa's beard.