Relativity

Today we went to church.  Church was good for me.  I felt the love of our ward for us and appreciated the support.  I enjoyed sacrament and gospel doctrine.  I found some interesting scriptures on restoration and a great scripture on the Atonement and how Christ has taken on all our pains.  This took on a new meaning for me after having heard a few people say they wish they could bear my burden for me.  Christ actually has and will take it if I let him.  Still the sorrow of separation is mine to bare.  I claim it as my own, for it is borne of love and inspires me to be the new woman Camille has shown me I can be.

It was my Sunday to teach in Young Women's.  I know they didn't really expect me to teach but I looked over the lesson during sacrament meeting and the Lord gave me a great analogy to start a lesson.  So I got to teach my analogy on the commandments being like a trampoline and then team teach the lesson on the commandments with my co advisor.  

Church was harder for Jon.  He always played with Camille in the hallway during Sunday school and priesthood.  He was missing her today.  He may not write but he reads all the blog posts and comments so if anyone wants to address him in them, he will be reading them.

After church we spent the day with family, mine first then his.  Many are leaving town tonight and tomorrow so we took time to say goodbye.  Our brother-in-law Spencer wrote a lullaby for Camille and sang it for us tonight.  He said he wrote it after watching us saying our goodbyes to Camille after we took all the tubes out.  It was beautiful.  It made us all cry.  I need to have him record it and put it as background to a slideshow with the pictures Elizabeth took at the hospital and funeral.

OK so that was the day and a couple of things of relativity have stuck out to me.  First, people have noted how hard it must have been to speak at her funeral.  I guess hard has taken on a new relativity for me.  Last Friday -- that was hard.  It was a whole new kind of hard.  This new "hard" made any other hard thing Jon or I had ever done seem like a walk in the park.  Finding her, the horror, the fear of losing her, the desperate pleas to heaven with no feeling of reassurance that she would live, the police investigation, the look of agony on my husband's face when I arrived at the hospital, the screams I heard coming from both of us as we desperately performed CPR, the keening in agony that first night in the hospital, the sickness in my stomach, the inability to sleep for 3 nights because the image of finding her would come into my head and wake me with adrenaline.  Yeah.  That was hard.  That was a whole new kind of hard.  It made speaking at her funeral seem pretty easy.  

I don't think it will ever be as hard as it was those days in the hospital.  Jon and I have had a strong peace since we acknowledged the will of the Lord was to have her home.  We have felt the Savior strengthening our backs and lightening our burden.  

On  the other end of the spectrum, what we are going through and have gone through is far easier than so many other things would be.  There are so many worse ways Camille could have been taken home.  Ways that could have permanently scarred my other children.  And as Joesph F. Smith, who buried nine of his own children once said, "I have learned that there are a great many things which are far worse than death.  With my present feelings and views and the understanding that I have of life and death, I would far rather follow every child I have to the grave in their innocence and purity, than to see them grow up to man and womanhood and degrade themselves by the pernicious practices of the world, forget the Gospel, forget God and the plan of life and salvation, and turn away from the only hope of eternal reward and exaltation in the world to come."

I have always said it would be easier to lose a child in physical death than in spiritual death.  I still maintain that for me, this is easier.  Trials ... we all have them.  They are all hard ... relatively speaking.