Driving home tonight, I was thinking about how little people here really know me. And that goes the other way too. It's a factor of moving I think. Maybe sometimes that is a blessing to be able to move and reinvent yourself. But sometimes, I realize that even my closest friends here only know a snapshot of me. Its like being an amputee but no one thinks you ever had another limb and the way you are is normal to them. Even if they know, because you have told them about the other limb you lost, because they never saw you with it, never knew her, never knew your family with 4 girls instead of 3, they don't see the loss every time they look.
Here I am 15+ years later. I still feel the loss every day. I am not sad about it everyday. But I live differently in the world still. My family is actively dealing with the consequences both big and small of that fateful day each and every day. We are still healing and trying to minimize the effects of the trauma. As my children mature they are processing their grief in new ways.
I used to find comfort in the thought that one day Camille's death would be a chapter in the book of my life and not my whole life. But I am finding it a bit lonely to be in a place in life where no one read that chapter with me and it seems so far in the past but in reality it has shaped the rest of my story so profoundly that it is a critical element to understanding me today.
Maybe that is the thing that will be most profoundly moving when we meet our Lord and Savior again. He will KNOW us, like really in a way no one else can, KNOW us. And in that knowing and being seen in a way we have never been seen by anyone else, we will feel His love.
