You Never Know

I only woke up every hour last night. In fact, I’m not even sure I really fell asleep but I was teetering between reality and dreamland.

I think that’s how it is with a loss. Immediately after it happens, you at first think it’s all a dream. You keep thinking that it’s all a nasty trick and the very one you lost will somehow miraculously appear.

Last night, a little five-year-old man was crushed to his death by a skid loader. For the privacy of the family, I’ll say no more than that, but in that one second everything changed.

I only know the family through other family, but as soon as I heard, I wept. That little curious boy could have been my Tosten. The very qualities that made this boy step into that place would have been the exact reasons my son would have done the same.

How do you sleep at night after that happens? How do you walk by his room? Wash his dirty clothes that he just wore the day before? How do you walk by the place you saw his lifeless, broken body? How do you drive or even touch the machine that crushed your little boy ever again? How do you even move on?

As I laid in bed last night, I was trying to grapple with these questions. I found myself sobbing in bed, then drifting to sleep to wake up and wonder if it was my Tosten that had died. I had to align my emotions and thoughts each time my dreams caused me to panic, but then as soon as I realized my Tosten was snuggled with his fleece blanket downstairs in his bed, I remembered that only an hour away another mama was having to try to survive the very thing I was at peace about. For that mama, this was not a horrific nightmare. This was her reality.

People always blanket a loss with “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.” I don’t want to seem faithless, but make me puke! Hey, I’ve used that verse, too, but it doesn’t bring that person back. Yes, the Lord gives and takes, praise His name, but we are left here on earth to somehow make sense of God’s logic.

Obviously, this little man is in a much grander place than what he had here on earth, but there has to be room to grieve in a time like this. You can blanket death with all the scripture you want, but there needs to be a moment to recognize the genuine void in your own life now that he is gone.

I’ve had my Tosten for over two years. I was madly in love with him as soon as I found out he was in my womb and that love has only grown as he has grown. To think the Lord could pluck him from my arms at any time breaks me. I trust God, I do, but I don’t know how to move on if that ever were to happen.

I guess I never will unless it occurs. I guess it would be a breath at a time. A moment at a time. An hour. A day. I guess I’d have to pick up his favorite pair of car rainboots and smile, probably with a whole bunch of tears, at the adventures he had in those boots and the puddles he splashed in with them on. I’d pull out his pictures and laugh as I remembered the hours chasing him all over our eight acres just to get one half decent smile on a photograph. I’d remember the dirt under his jagged fingernails and the two cowlicks on the back of his head that gave him a natural mowhawk. I’d try to remember all the days I had with him and the rough days would vanish.

And maybe that’s what I need to rest in today. I’ve had a lot of rough days the past weeks, yet I have my baby boy. Tosten has been testing his limits and his heights and what he can sneak away with without his mom or dad noticing or caring. Yet he snuggles in my arms and I get to still enjoy his snot globs on my pants. Some days I’ve wanted to yank my hair out at his toddler insanity, but I still want him. He may be the Lord’s, but somehow he’s part of me. He’s mine. He’s my baby boy. Even when he’s 16 and hormonal. Even when he’s going off to college or getting married. Even when he holds his first child.

Tosten Lee will be my little boy and my love will only grow as he does.

I never knew I could love someone so much, yet here I am, head over heels for a little short, thick man. He roars on an hourly basis and he loves to keep things in their place like his daddy.

So I’ll savor him for as long as I have him, because you never know. You never, ever, ever know.

And even if that hellish moment comes and Tosten is taken from me before I’m ready, I will nestle my brokenness in Christ’s strength. All these questions and fears and little deaths as a result if he leaves this earth before I do, Jesus will hold me upright and love me in my chaos.