What we should have felt...

...was hope.

What I expected to feel...

was hope.

We lay awake in the early morning hours, silently, knowing the other was awake...still...there were no words spoken for quite a while.

"I didn't expect to feel such pain today."

That's what he said to me...the tears fell from my eyes and covered my pillow.  It was an overwhelming, heavy, suffocating pain that enveloped us both.

I hesitated to even try to put anything into words, but to be honest I didn't expect the pain of her absence to come over us the very moment our eyes opened this Easter morning.

Hope is what I thought this holiday would bring to our exhausted, broken, shattered hearts.  It did not.

We went through the day struggling.  We cried.  We hurt.  We were silent.  We were angry.  We were confused by it all.  Still are.

The letters H O P E hang on the wall in her play room.  I can't tell you how many times I have felt like ripping them down off that wall in the last 8 months.  There was a moment as she lay in her hospital bed underneath those stupid letters that spell that stupid word and I knew, it came so violently to me, and I knew there was no more hope.  We were no longer hopeful that she would recover.  I have resented those letters and that word and what it once represented in our life for so long.  Its ridiculous, I know, but its the truth.

Then Easter came.

 Our first one without her.

  For some stupid reason I had convinced myself that I would feel comforted and hopeful knowing that because of His resurrection I would one day see my sweet Ash again.  I could not have been more wrong. We felt devastated.  We did.  We felt betrayed and broken and destroyed.  What should have brought comfort to our aching souls only seemed to hurt all the more.  I don't get it.  I've spent this week trying to understand why it hurt us so deeply to endure this holiday without her here.  I know in my heart where she is and that her celebration was more than I could ever comprehend.  Still my soul, the deepest part of who I am, is screaming.  It is.  I wish it weren't, but it is.  Still.

We did not feel what we thought we should have felt.  It gets harder every day.  Don't be fooled when people tell you that it will get easier.  It will not.  It does not.