My "Ghost Limb" Strategy

Because of the recent losses our family has faced in the past few months, I'm still struggling - not with my faith, but with my day-to-day joy. I have come to the realization that joy is an inside-out job. If you don't have it inside, you can't radiate it outward. I don't have a lot of inner "human" joy right now. What I have right now is faith and hope and anticipation of joy that is to come.

I don't know if I will ever have another day of real joy in the human sense, but I know that I need to hold on until the day that I receive my eternal joy. And it's the "holding on" that I am working on.

It's hard to wake up every morning to a world knowing that my sister is not here. It's hard to think past that sadness toward even the idea of ever being happy again. I may have said this before, but it's as though losing my sister froze my emotions long enough for me to get through her funeral and the first days that followed. But now, every moment is a new pain of loss, like the body regaining feeling in once frozen parts.

I had been thinking to myself that the way to get through this is to get through it just as I got through losing my father, then my mother, and then one of my brothers. It dawned on me, so suddenly that it almost took my breath, that the only way I got through those other losses was because I had my sister with me.

So, all this new and unfamiliar pain is about having to get through the loss of Mike. I don't have another Mike. I don't have that other person who knows me so well, and who knows how to talk me through this grief.

My sister and I were so very close that I didn't just lose a sibling. I lost my best friend in the world. I lost the person who stood with me when friends didn't, when the men in my life didn't and, sometimes, when I didn't even stand for myself. She loved me so unconditionally that I can't replace that with another human being.

So.

For the first time in my life, I have to find my strength without Mike to help me.

I'm coming up with my "holding on" strategy using what my sister taught me about her life without legs.

When Mike lost her legs - first one, then a year later, the other - she talked about the way she still could "feel" them. They itched, they ached, the would get restless. Since her "ghost limbs" could be annoying in a very "real" way, Mike treated them as if they were still there. If they itched, she'd scratch them; if they ached, she'd rub them, and so on.  I always found this hilarious and when I asked if the scratching and rubbing really helped, she said, it did. "I can feel the itching, so the scratching helps," she told me.

I think about that now a lot and I am learning to think of Mike as my "ghost limb". Sometimes, I "feel" her smiling at me when I do something silly, or wiping away my tears when I am crying. She's not here here, but I can still feel her in my heart.

Mike couldn't walk on her ghost limbs, but they were still a present/not-present part of her. I can't hug my sister anymore, but she is still a present/not-present part of me. Her soul is present right now with Jesus and, one day, her perfected body will be resurrected - legs and all. One day, I will see my sister again and we'll be whole and free and reunited.

In the meantime, I'm struggling with this ghost limb strategy of holding on to the love my sister left me with.

Peace
--Free