A dark cloud settling

So, what came next? A constant need existed to occupy our minds. This busyness and sense of adventure really did help dull the pain we felt deep within, or at least it helped us avoid dealing with it until a later time when we might handle it better emotionally. First we took a long vacation, far away from home, and then we headed out on a short mission-trip, the very thing that made our hearts beat. After that, two precious little puppies filled our home with life again.

Suddenly the calendar didn’t hold a single new activity or adventure. I didn’t know how to handle that. Life started to dry up all over again.

My emotions didn’t expect a rollercoaster ride through those dry months. Oh, how it hurt to attend a “baby shower” for a fellow teacher adopting two children. I still remembered when she expressed a tug on her heart to look into adoption after I announced our original plans to adopt from El Salvador. Now, over two years later, she adopted not one, but two children. We inspired her to start the process. Now, a son and daughter filled her arms, while mine felt emptier than ever.

One of the couples we met in Austin finally traveled to Colombia to complete their adoption of a child they met the same summer we met Juan David and Viviana. I felt thrilled for them, but reading their blog tore me up inside. They posted pictures of places we planned to visit. They stayed in the very place we arranged to stay. Those were supposed to be our pictures, our adventures, and our memories. Yet they reminded us now of pictures we’d never get to take, adventures we’d never experience, dreams that would not become realities, memories we'd never build.

I tried to settle back into life and work, but the emptiness quickly resurfaced. While I paid no attention, the music in me died. I found myself in a spiritual and emotional drought. In times past, I always had my poetry as an outlet, as sad as it might have been at times, to get me past each hump in the road, to help me connect my inner and outer worlds, to help me process and make sense of what life handed me.

Now I had nothing left in me to even try to write. Empty pages stared blankly at me. With no new goals to reach for and no new adventures in sight, this unforgettable loss hung over like a dark cloud. I began to die inside, another stage of the grief I didn’t know would come.