loss | annkilter

Tags

9-11, loss, Shock, Terror, The two towers

12 years ago today, I had taken the kids to school. Then I came back home to get ready to go to class at the community college. It was the beginning of the second week of the first year of going back to college for me. The TV was off, and I was putting a pork roast in the crock pot before leaving for classes. Ralph called and asked if I had the TV on? “No. Why?” “We’re under attack,” he said.

I turned it on and it was just after the second plane had hit the second tower, and Katie and Matt were speculating that it might not be an accident, it probably wasn’t an accident, but something more sinister.

Then I went to school, and between classes, students were standing around the TVs on campus watching the towers fall again and again.

Tags

autism, grief, hope, loss

This poem is often given to parents of children with Down Syndrome or Cerebral Palsy before they leave the hospital.

This poem was given to me when we were in the midst of the early elementary years with our kids, when the we were in the midst of school activities and therapies. My kids are a gift from God, and he will use them in the lives of others. Still, this poem expresses things that are true.

http://www.our-kids.org/Archives/Holland.html

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this……

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…. and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills….and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away… because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But… if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things … about Holland.