Enormous and Eternal

Opening up this blog again after 3 years makes my heart beat faster. There is never a day when I'm not Hyrum's Mom, but there are plenty of days when my life looks like cancer, DIPG and death never touched it. Sometimes I indulge that illusion too much, and I need reminders like this to keep me grounded. Perhaps for that reason, and a vague concoction of other reasons that I don't yet understand, I am here blogging again. I guess, for one thing, I want to join hands again with people who are no longer in the middle of their darkest hour, but are still shaking off the shadows of it. 

Here's our quick 3-year update: we are in a beautiful phase. Since Hyrum's death, we've had two more children. Michael was recruited away from his online job and now works at his dream job here in OKC. He also picked up a newly beloved side-hustle as a financial coach and *almost* financial therapist. Who woulda thought that go-go-go guy would voluntarily sit himself down for a masters degree before I did?? He graduates in the spring and I'm very proud of him. 

Caleb and Emily are walking miracles. I can hardly fathom how and why they are as healthy, healed, and happy as they are, given the things their tiny selves saw and felt not too long ago. Jesus truly is a miraculous healer. We have to remind them about moments and memories they shared with Hyrum, but they each retain a few sacred memories of their own. Michael probably wishes we did more of that... so if you have any ideas about how you retain connections with your dead people, let me know!! I want to hear it. 

The other big update is that we're moving soon!! It's a story for another day, but in summary: we knew we'd move sometime, mostly as a symbolic gesture to ourselves that we can grow beyond our old cancer selves. We didn't expect now to be the time, but we caught the nod from God and apparently, it is! As a result of that, I was grappling with some symbolic shadows of my own last week. Something about the muscle memory of taping together cardboard boxes and scrubbing walls (an activity which I would never do in my normal life lol) must have dredged up some feelings from August 2022, when we moved away from this house to pursue a clinical trial in California. 

It wasn’t the worn-in, residual grief to which I’ve become accustomed. After that initial period in early 2022 of acute shock and grief, I’ve found residual grief to be a soft, unselfish emotion that shares space generously with other feelings, like humility, gratitude, and love- even joy. My run-in last week was not a regular grief moment, but a subconscious trauma moment that left me sobbing through the bulk of Emily’s sixth birthday. My eyelids and emotional equilibrium recovered a couple days later, and this is a transcription of my scrawly handwritten journal entry, describing a little miracle that helped make that happen. 

October 15, 2026: "I grabbed a notebook from our box-filled garage because I needed to write another soul-deep prayer. The first book I grabbed was empty, though, and that felt weird. I put it back and grabbed this one instead, hoping to slip in a sorrowful soliloquy after a scattered collection of lived-in pages. I froze when I flipped it open and found myself staring at a drawing from Hyrum. This notebook is August 2022. I haven't seen it since then. I have no idea where it came from. 

You know, I was going to ask God if I'm really capable of moving on, if there really is a "me" beyond this Chesterton house. Not only are big transitions objectively nerve-wracking, but this one feels dangerously symbolic of the way life forces us to leave Hyurm behind... First his health, then his body, now his bedroom and the last Oklahoma sidewalks that ever felt his feet. All week, my subconscious traumas gnaw at me, taunting me with an apparition of my small, lonely boy... "Don't leave me. Don't let me die."

I cannot undo his death, but I certainly did not leave him to die. I held his limp body at his very last breath, and stood side by side with Michael so that Hyrum was never alone, never forgotten, always so loved. I did not leave him then, and I am not leaving him now by moving houses. I walked through hell to meet him at a place of newly-won emotional composure, and I can walk forward now if it takes me one step closer to a millennial day when we are together again. 

He is not behind me. He is with, around, and ahead. He is not the haunted vision in my head. He was never that boy in life, and he would never feel that way now... forlorn, withdrawn, cold, sad, still, betrayed, half-dead... The more I stare at that apparition, the more I see it as trauma's lie. And I am not the kind of person that bows to trauma. 

I am divine, strong enough to hurt and wise enough to cry. I am humble enough to seek help and embodied in power by sleep, showers, cooking, and more. I link my hands with Isaiah and Alma, digging my feet deeper in the sea-drenched sand until I find my Rock. I am patient enough to hold to His moments of reassurance and peace even if I cannot feel them all the time. I know the rhythm of times and seasons, and I know that for a Christ-centered soul, peace always comes back around. I trust in who God has made me to be. There is nothing of which I am not capable-- no previous obstacle that I have not learned from Him how to overcome. 

Trauma can lie, steal, and cheat, but I am not small, like it wants me to feel. "I am large, and contain multitudes" (Whitman) I tower over my traumas, endowed with every inch of power that my physical frame could possibly possess. I am enormous, eternal, and I will not bow to false fears or fabricated guilt. I look to my hopeful, beckoning God, not the haunting howl of my past. He welcomes me home, veteran that I am of cancer's crusade and death's war upon our family. 

He welcomes me home. 

I know that the real Hyrum is not the shivering, lifeless waif that haunted me this week. He is the noble, sable soul, slipping softly between layers of matter, pursuing our divine end. He is a hand beckoning us forward, onward, upward, so that we can be like him. Did you see the sunrise picture he drew me on an earlier page of this book? It was not meant for me in 2022, but for me, his Mom, in 2026. His shaky lines remind me of the effort it took him then to pen what his soul must sing so confidently now,

 "Meet me there... at the sunrise of the Savior. Meet me there."