Down Days

Today is one of those down days.  It is beautiful outside, yet I lack the energy or the motivation to do something outside, much less inside.  I suppose that waking up with a severe headache certainly contributed to feeling down today.  Thankfully it has mostly subsided.  I find myself taking the time to think back over our vacation – this was the first one (other than trips to the cabin) since Scott’s death. 

We were so busy going and doing that I didn’t have much time to think about the moments that I marked in my memory, moments when Scott’s absence was so obvious and painful.  A majority of those moments were times of missing Scott for Jaelyn.  Playing tennis and pool with her -- both games that Scott was good at and I only know the basics -- and missing Scott’s patience in teaching her how to hold and improve her swing with a tennis racket or how to hold a pool cue and line up the ball to the pockets brought sadness to my heart.  I think the fact that our vacation was at Massanutten – a place where Scott and I have been quite a few times on vacation, both before and after Jaelyn’s birth – made it more difficult.  Maybe this is why I looked for things to do away from Massanutten’s grounds.  It was easier to do things with Jaelyn that we had not done before as a family, rather than to do the things that we had done with Scott in the past. 

During vacation, I thought a lot about all the changes in our lives and the Bradley family’s lives since we were last at Massanutten in March of 2011.  First of the major changes was my mother-in-law’s stroke, followed by Scott’s death just five months later, and our nephew leaving for college in Massachusetts just two days after Scott’s funeral.  So, with “all” the family at Massanutten, we were missing Nando and Abby (in Boston), and Scott, and trying to help my mother-in-law do as many of the things she enjoys doing as possible while being wheelchair bound.  We have adjusted and continue to move forward, but the pain of the loss and change still remains. 

Don’t get me wrong, we had a lot of fun on vacation and got to do a lot of different things – it wasn’t all sad moments.  I simply think that those sad moments are hitting me today.  I am thankful that the down days do not come frequently and, by the grace of God, I am able to rebound and pull myself out of those moments with God’s strength.