That shatteringly lonely sorrow of missing my kids

Having a coffee date with my middle daughter, we got to discussing an article I wrote last year about how close I came to suicide on one occasion when my first marriage had failed.  She was so very thankful I got through it—some don’t.

Within moments it was like I was transported back there.  Noticing my willingness to answer questions and be accessible in that grief, her curiosity augmented the space I needed to share into.

I began to share not only of the revelation I got—that I was reminded that I had three dear children that needed me—but also of the character of the grief in that time.

I shared that I grieved solidly for 9 months, almost as if it were a gestation period.  After that time elapsed, it was like a switch went on inside me and I reached an important transition.  But there was one kind of grief that I felt for three years—until I married again.

During those three years, I cared for my daughters on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and every second weekend.  I would look forward to the Friday afternoon, plan dates and activities and visits and time together, but I loathed the barren emptiness I experienced after taking them back to their mother on Sunday nights.

Those nights I dropped them off, I was relieved that they were happy with either their mother or I—I just wanted them content.  But as I drove the 20 kilometres home, I’d often sob my heart out, very often to Avril Lavigne.  (Even now when I hear Avril Lavigne, I’m shot back to 2003-2004 in a flash, and I love it.)

There was just so much sheer core sorrow in having to say goodbye when I felt like everything that was important to me could be taken away just like that.  But it was also the bone dry and excruciating loneliness that I felt being in my own company.

It was just so foreign to be all alone, and to be honest, I hated it.  For six whole months I lamented being alone and would often bewail my very existence, even though I was amid a personal spiritual revival.

Whole weeks during school holidays were another thing altogether.  I looked forward to them with so much expectancy, yet on the second last day before taking my daughters home I was often miserable and moody—which was a form of denial that loss was again imminent.  I would recover on that final day, to make the absolute most of my time with them.  And when I finally did get them home, I then often had 24-48 hours of the worst loneliness anyone can endure.

I’ve actually worked for my former wife, which shows we had a very cooperative separation even though I experienced the most immense grief.  Those first nine months genuinely felt as though I’d lost everything.

Yet, as I was reflecting with my daughter, I couldn’t help but say it, that “those harrowing loneliest of times were what connected me to God—because God was surely all I had left.”  I had the love of my parents, my two sponsors in AA, the pastor and the elders and the people in the church, but other than that and my three daughters, I had nobody and nothing.

The ironic and paradoxical thing nowadays is I pine to go back to this time of my worst grief and lament.  It was formational and foundational, a time like this before or since I’ve not had anywhere near that intimacy.

But had I an hour meter for how many hours I either sobbed or lamented, I’d hate to think of the tally.  Such a brutally lonely season lasts and lasts and lasts, and it’s a situation that cannot be shifted.

But on a night like tonight, when a nearly 27-year-old asks what it was like for me when she was 8, we both feel an enormity of contentedness, so thankful to God for his faithfulness.