I didn’t always hate Mother’s Day. Tomorrow will make a year since I started hating it.
It was six days before training camp and five days after my squadmate had died in a car wreck. I wasn’t in the best of spirits, so I was pretty ready to take a day off from thinking and feeling and packing, and just focus on making my mom feel celebrated on the last Mother’s Day I’d be spending with her for awhile.
I had no idea when I woke up that morning that life as I knew it would end in a few short hours.
I get to church and my brother isn’t there. I angrily text him asking where he is. While I wait for his reply, I get a group text from a few of our cross country teammates, talking about going to our coach’s house. This confuses me because why would the team be hanging out on Mother’s Day? Then Scott replies to me, “Something happened and I was up until 7am. I’m coming to church to tell you about it and then we’re going to Coach’s.” I can’t imagine anything being important enough to not be at church, and to have lunch with our friends instead of our mom; it’s MOTHER’S DAY. But I also could never have imagined anything so horrific as what I was about to hear.
So after church, I walk out and find Scott in the parking lot. He says he came back to his dorm last night and there were ambulances and cop cars surrounding the building, and they weren’t letting anyone in or out. The deans finally called the whole campus into the chapel at 1am.
I know as he’s saying this that someone is dead, and I’m pretty sure he’s about to say someone on the team.
He says, “They found Daniel Blanchard…”
He pauses. I frantically pray that he’d just had some serious medical thing and was now in the hospital and will be fine, that he won’t say what I know he’s going to.
“…dead.”
I stand there in the hot sun and my insides feel like ice, and I wish I was dead, because I know what happened, even before Scott continues and explains that they haven’t yet confirmed if it was suicide. I know.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people misuse the word “literally,” because every time I say it, I LITERALLY mean literally, and most people don’t, so I’m afraid people will stop taking me seriously when I say it. So please know that I literally mean it when I say that I hear those words and my heart literally feels like it’s trying to drop out of my chest. My physical heart, the one beating in my literal chest, physically hurts in a way I’ve never felt before, and I wonder if it’s possible to die of shock because that’s literally what I feel like is happening. I’m dying. Thoughts move through my mind like toothpaste in a tube that I’m too tired to squeeze. The world has stopped. I can’t make words come out of my mouth; all I have in my mind is an image of Daniel refusing to wake up, and an echo of those five words that changed my life forever.
I realize my mom is talking to me; I’d say I snapped back to reality, except there was nothing but reality. My friend is dead. On purpose. He’s gone. There is no more Daniel. But I come out of my head for long enough to hear Mom ask if I’m okay to drive.
I nod, because I still forget how to make words. Driving is the only thing that I’m okay to do, because driving will get me to my team, and they’re the only people in the world who might feel the same way I’m feeling.
I spend the whole day at Coach’s house, forgetting that Mother’s Day is even a thing anymore. And every day that week I spent every minute either there or at school, only leaving my teammates to go to work or to go home to sleep. Nothing made it better, but it’s just different being with people who also can’t figure out how to feel better.
Eventually I had to get back to packing, go to training camp, work 3 more weeks at Moe’s, work one week at camp, spend one week saying goodbyes, go to Atlanta, and get on a plane to Bolivia.
I thought I’d get to put my grieving on the back burner for a year, or maybe never deal with it at all.
Instead God used the Race to heal me in a way that a year at home with my friends never would have.
But you’ve already read about that in several other posts throughout the past ten months.
It’s still hard to think about that day. I’ll never be happy that it happened. I’ll always be sad when I go back to visit the team and there’s no Daniel. Mother’s Day won’t always be on May 11th, but I’ll still never think of the day the same way again, because of that one time when Mother’s Day was the literal worst day of my life.
When my granddad died, I cried for an hour then never cried about it again, not even at the funeral. But in the week following the worst Mother’s Day ever, I cried more than I had in my entire life. I’d get in bed at night and cry until I fell asleep, then I’d wake up, remember what had happened and cry again. Then there were always several times throughout the day that I’d lose it; even at work one day, my manager caught me hiding in the walk-in fridge crying and sent me home(not in a “you’re fired” way; in a “you’re my favorite and you shouldn’t have to work when your friend is dead” way).
It doesn’t feel like that was all a year ago. It feels like it was last week.
I’ve had a really hard time thinking about how the World Race is ending so soon…but today, I don’t feel like being here. I don’t feel like crying in my squadmates’ arms; I feel like curling up on the big couch in my coach’s living room in a big pile with my teammates, crying about Daniel while watching Pitch Perfect. Just for today.
A year later, I want to write about how I’m all better and look at all the good God brought out of the worst situation ever and hey, there’s so much hope if you’ve been through the same thing as me!!
But nope. Well, yes, all of that is true, but today I don’t FEEL as hopeful and better as I’d like to after so much time. I’ve worked a whole lot on my ripped open smashed up heart, but apparently it takes a lot longer than a year to get over something this big. I’m a lot better, but not all better. Some days, most days actually, I’m more better than others. On rare days I feel the same as when it just happened.
BUT, if I’ve learned anything in the past almost eleven months, it’s that I’m allowed to struggle. God doesn’t sit at the top of the pit and wait to congratulate me when I climb out of it; he climbs down and sits in it with me, and when I’m ready, he picks me up in his arms and carries me out.
The same will still be true when I get home.
