Tammy McClelland

I know that many of you have been wondering how we are doing. There is not a lot of positive or good things that I can say right now for where we are. I think most of you probably know that. This part of the journey, while I have dreaded it for 10 months, is much harder and painful for the children and I then I imagined it could be.

The service for Travis, while hard for us in many ways, was exactly what we felt like God had put on our hearts. We left there that day, with a peace and comfort that all involved portrayed his life well that day. The children even remarked that “dad would have been really proud of that.” And he is. We left from the service and headed out-of-town for a few days. We all felt that we needed some time to ease into coming home and the reality that Travis wasn’t there. That was very good for our hearts. All the emotion that is associated with our house was absent. It many ways, it was still hard. We would be doing something, fishing, hanging out, whatever and it wouldn’t be long before someone would say, “I wish dad were here.” or “Dad should be here” or “Dad would love this.”

We spent the last 10 years or so making our marriage and our family the priority. When I say that we did everything together, we really did. I do not think that we consciously at the time realized the importance of those decisions but we established a strong family identity as a whole and with each other individually. That was good and I don’t regret it but it makes this place that much more painful because the hole is that much more evident. It is felt in every moment and in everything we do.

We lived the last 10 months, moment by moment. We are still doing the same now. We are not requiring much of ourselves. We are struggling to figure out to “be” now in this place and that takes most of our energy. Grief itself is exhausting. Even among the 5 of us in this house, we are all processing grief differently. We are also learning to offer each other a lot of grace and mercy in this place as well. Our youngest said it best the other day when she said to me, “I walk around all day and there is always this tear in the corner of my eye that is ready to fall any moment.” That about sums it up.

There is an actual physical pain and ache in my chest that never seems to go away. Some days, that pain is intensified like on Mondays which marks the day of Travis’ passing or when I had to pick up his remains. It still seems surreal. I keep thinking that this is a nightmare and I will wake up. Acceptance seems to be hard fought for all of us at this point. I think one of the most freeing things that the grief counselor said is that there is no time limit on the stages on grief. It might take 3 weeks for me to accept Travis’ passing or it might take 3 months.

This will be the last post on Care Pages. Care Pages are meant for patients and their families and we no longer fall into that category. This is not the venue for me to use to post about our journey from this point on. I have moved all of these Care Page posts over to my blog site: http://tjmcclelland.wordpress.com/
(I apologize to those of you that keep receiving notices that a new post was up. I could not figure out a way to move them without notices being sent out.) If you wish to follow the continuation of our family’s journey then feel free through my blog.

Thank you again for all your cards, texts, FB messages, etc. While I have not been able to respond to all of them due to the emotional energy that requires on my part. They have always seemed to come at the most opportune moment. A moment when I really needed to know that there really were people lifting my name to God even though they were unaware of where I might be in that moment.