Live Like Lucas

My heart breaks. It breaks because of young people- middle schoolers and highschoolers who are hurting.  Before it was my job to take care of my high schooler and I had a very narrow view of what my job was.  Take care of Lucas.  Take care of my other kids.

I don’t have a high school age child anymore.  Which ironically has opened my eyes in such a tremendous way- and it is just so frightening.

Now that he is gone I feel like I need to get in touch with them, with students, to get a feel for what the pulse of the high school is like.  While I am taking baby steps I feel a calling to help there- somehow.

The report I get there is so much hurt, so much loneliness, insecurity, anxiety, depression, hopelessness.  That kids are not helping each other through tough times and instead pouring salt in each other’s wounds.

I am very very saddened.

I also know that there are some, probably many, wonderful kids. I have met a handful. Kids that “get it.” Kids that get why they are put on this earth.  That its not about them. Whose hearts are full of love and kindness.  I guess that there are not enough of those kids to influence the others.

I know there are cases where “Live Like Lucas” has already come and gone and it’s back to reality.  Students are just wanting people to like them, to stay in the right crowd, to make sure their own happiness comes first. They take other’s problems and use them as a way to boost their own self esteem.

I don’t know if that many, say, 12-18 year olds read my blog.  If they did, I would say to them, you do not know how much time you have on this earth.  How many times have you heard that, right? It would never happen to me. It would never happen to me. Well it happened to our family. Our worst nightmare came true.  Lucas had 15 years and ten days on this earth.  You just don’t know.

Even if you lived to be 100, why do you think you are here? To be popular, to be well liked, to push others down on the way to the top?

How would you want to be treated if you were hurting? How do you want to be treated, period?  Many of those who hurt do it because of their own hurt.  The cycle must be stopped.

I don’t know exactly what the answer is, to healing all this pain and suffering these kids are going through.

Well I do know one answer, a very important one.

Mark 12:30-31 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ ³¹ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

John 3:16  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Ephesians 4:32 “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”

I am on my knees in prayer for these kids.  I am begging God for a transformation. I am begging for an answer.

I have lost a child. There is nothing I can do about it. Nothing.

Yet how I deal with it now is everything.  My attitude about it is everything.

Yes I have very bad days, a lot of them where I choke back tears all day.  My stomach feels sick all day.  I feel that angst, that want, that need that ache to have my son back that feels so overpowering that nothing else can matter, I can’t breathe, I can’t think, I can’t….

Then I come back to some sort of center where I know I will go on, I have to go on, Lucas wants me to go on, God put me on this earth to be something other than a grieving mother.

Most of the time right now that is all I am, I look like I am doing other things but inside all I do is grieve.

Sometimes I see the big picture.  Mostly in people, that God has given me, so that I can survive.  In verses, in songs, and in people.

Today I did yoga with Kelly Shomin who is on my list of “best people ever” (doesn’t everyone kind of have a list like that?).  Something called restorative yoga.  Its amazing.  I will tell you why- there are very few times I can actually feel un-sad and un-anxious and actually…good? It almost feels like an exaggeration.  I feel good.  I feel peace. The best part of today was she shared this poem by Mother Teresa.

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered.

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish motives.

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful

Succeed anyway

If you are honest and sincere, people may cheat you.

Be honest and sincere anyway.

What you spend years building someone could destroy overnight.

Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous.

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow.

Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may not be enough.

Give them your best anyway.

In the final analysis, it is between you and God.

It was never between you and them anyway.

Bless her heart, she said it reminded her of Lucas.  It does because it also reminds me of the Albert Einstein quote I said at the game, “Life isn’t worth living unless it is lived for someone else.”

I may be sad and heartbroken and crushed but I am not here for me.  I was created by the Creator to do his work.  That is the only way I can feel true joy. That is the only way I will be able to get past my pain.  That is the only way that I will be able to heal.  I know my definition from here on our is “mother who has lost a child,” but that does not mean I cannot be “mother who does God’s work.”  I will do it not only because I know that is what I was created to do but because my beautiful boy would want me to.  I know that is where I get the courage.

I know I just blogged a few hours ago, but I found this next to my computer and well…It deserves its own post.  This is my son.  In a nutshell. An email to his spanish teacher…

Dear Mrs. Malivuk,

I just wanted to send you a letter to let you know how great of a teacher you are.  I truly appreciate how kind you always are, and that you are so great to your students.  Some teachers don’t understand we are people too, but you have always afforded us respect.  Your class is easily my favorite.  Simply put- it is just enjoyable. (Students name) well he is one of a kind, as I am sure you understand, but that just shows your patience with your students.  I am always available to help him out with material.  If you ever get overwhelmed with him, I am always there to help!!

Thanks for everything, and merry Christmas,

Lucas Van Sprange

This is what the world lost and heaven gained on January 16.  This was no ordinary 15 year old.

If this touched your heart-

Help me, in any way you can to spread the Live Like Lucas movement.  Such a loss cannot go with our a tremendous gain.  The world needs to know. To learn. To change.

If you are willing to help me email me at melissa_conner@comcast.net

Lets spread his legacy.

I just laid in my bed (almost) all day….not such a good plan, but every time I would get out I would just feel so awful I would climb back in.  It was despair- deep, dark, heavy, painful, heart wrenching despair.  My heart felt like it weighed 500 pounds.  I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I could not even see an end to the tunnel.

I wonder, so often, how people get through this.  I wonder equally often how such pain is even humanly possible because I feel as if the heaviness will just make my heart stop beating.

As I lay in bed I wanted to feel close to Lucas, which is not often, strangely because it hurts too much.  As far away as I can stay to that “closeness” the better.  Yet I had this longing to read the texts we had sent to each other, almost just to convince myself that I could do it.

So I did.  I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled through, “tell Rich to start dinner” and many many “what time do you want me to pick you up” texts.  Then I got to the ones where I was pestering him to find his coat.  I had bought him a brand new coat this year, not a cheap one, and he had lost it.  As a mother, I felt this was a big problem.  There were “did you check the bus”, “did you check every class”, “did you check the office again?” It went on and on.  It was such a big deal to me.  He felt very badly about it.  Very. Badly.  As the mom of a teenager I thought would be in my life forever, I continued to berate him about losing the $200 coat.  He kept telling me over and over, “the old north face is fine.  I don’t need a new one.  Its fine.  Its fine.  Its fine.” It was a lighter weight spring-ish version he had had for two years.  I ended up buying him another new one.  It is hanging in our closet having been worn once.  The day he died he was wearing the old north face coat.

It didn’t matter.  It didn’t matter at all.  Coats don’t matter.

I also had gotten on his case about shoes.  I had bought him brand new shoes as part of his christmas present.  I had hinted very obviously about this fact yet he went and bought new ones with his grandma when he was there for the weekend.  I was pissed.  I went off on him over text, for no particular reason, it seems, other than the fact that I had picked out these cool ones and I didn’t like the ones he had picked.  The gorgeous bright blue and green tennis shoes that I bought him are now in our garage in a bin with his backpack, untouched, waiting. Worn less than a month.  For…what?  I don’t know.

It didn’t matter.  It didn’t matter at all. Tennis shoes don’t matter.

I did find these two texts.

My sweetheart.  My wonderful boy.  My pain is as deep as the love I had for him.  I am going to learn from him like I hope others do as well.  Learn to love like Jesus.  Unconditionally.

John 13:34-35

It’s been just over six weeks and it is still so early. So fresh. I still, as crazy as it sounds feel like he just might walk through the door one of these afternoons around 3:00.  Maybe it doesn’t sound nutty at all.  After all I had him for fifteen years.  How does one’s brain catch on to that? We are so accustomed and familiar with life. Life is familiar and second nature.  Comings and goings.  Meals, activities, games, outings, gatherings, sitting at home doing homework.  Life.  Doing Life.

Then it stops for one of our own. One of the fold. A treasured piece of the puzzle.  A precious son.

I saw every part of it, every horrible part and I still don’t really believe it.  In my heart of hearts as his mommy I still don’t really believe it.

How can we be good with this? Ever? That is what I am questioning today.  Every day.

We are not good with death.  I am not good with death.  Is anyone?  What a foreign, awful concept that there is no Lucas sitting at my kitchen table and eating dinner with us.  That he’s not sitting on my couch talking to his friends on his iphone.  He’s not practicing baseball. He’s not sitting in class taking notes. He’s not where he is SUPPOSED to be.  HE’S NOT THERE.

I struggle, I really struggle with thinking about him in heaven not because I don’t think he’s there but because I want him here more.  I can’t picture heaven, I don’t know heaven.  I don’t know what he looks like in heaven.  I don’t know if he can send messages to me from heaven.  I don’t know heaven.  I only know here.

I only know what he looked like eating sloppy joes at my dinner table that Thursday night.  I only know the appreciative look he gave the guy who gave him a haircut Thursday night.  He had gone to someone new and he raved about how precise and artistically he cut hair and how cool it was he was in a band.  He got a new hair product.  a really expensive one.  Then we went home and he went to do his homework and I went to bed.

Then like a stop button hit on a movie was his life over for me.  I didn’t see him the next morning until he was laying in the snow.  I was a lazy stupid mom and didn’t get up to see him off to school the next morning.  I didn’t give him a hug.  I only got to touch his lifeless arm and face and kiss his lifeless forehead at the hospital.

I know his “life” didn’t end there. I told 1200 people that at a basketball game.  I am just dealing with my humanness that I still want to be his mommy.  HERE.  Yes, I know I am still his Mom I just can’t cook him dinner or hug him or drive him to practice or talk about girls or school or friends or watch him play baseball.  That sure as hell doesn’t feel like a Mom.

God help me.  I know that this is going to a long hard struggle.  Probably for the rest of my life.  The more books I read, the more groups (mostly online) the more I realize that this is just not an event in your life, this DEFINES you.  How it defines you is up to you but there is no escaping the pain.  There is simply no escape.

Do I feel differently about the struggle and the pain because I have a God who loves me and shares the pain with me? Yes.

Every day I read Jesus Calling by Sarah Young.  March 5: “Make friends with the problems in your life.  Though many things feel random and wrong, remember that I am sovereign over everything. I can fit everything into a pattern for good, but only to the extent that you trust me…”

“I will not necessarily remove your problems but my wisdom is sufficient to bring good out of every one of them.”

Every day this book speaks to me and seems like it is just for the struggles I am having today.

I cry buckets of tears. Every day.  Yet I never feel alone.

Busy…it feels good to be busy…no time to think or reflect or remember or ponder.  Rearranging bedrooms, picking paint colors, sorting what clothes fit and what ones don’t.  It’s how to survive, much of the time.  I feel like it is what I should be doing so I don’t immerse myself in hurt.  Just plug along, keep on swimming, keep on swimming…

Ha. Says my brain.  Nice try.  I was trying to clean up the duck “area.” Yes we have one surviving domesticated Pekin duck.  Lucas got chickens after Goodwillie, 17 to be exact, and 4 ducks.  The other fowl were not so fortunate.  They fell prey to hawks, raccoons, foxes and other various ferocious beasts.

So we have one duck left. She doesn’t even have a name, because when you have 21 birds you don’t get around to naming them.  I was worried about her this winter being the only one left and the chicken coop had been sold.  We had built her a shelter last year but she hadn’t used it.  It was out on the way way back of our property.  I asked Lucas to please go get it.  My good- hearted son dragged that beast of a wooden box, covered in dirt and grime and grossness closer to the house so poor ducky might be interested in using it.  I remember watching him do it, seeing how nasty and heavy it was, and thinking, what a great kid I have.

Then we had to go to TSC to get duck food and hay.  Once it freezes the ducky can’t dig in the pond or yard for bugs or whatever it eats.  So Lucas and I went, all the way to Lowell, with Bryleigh and Brady in tow.  Hay and duck food come in huge amounts so of course he loaded them up, and as I paid I was like, wow this is really expensive.  I just bought it anyway.

As we got in the car I kept looking at the receipt and shaking my head.  Lucas looked at it and started laughing.  The hay was like 23.00 or something.  We both were laughing our heads off that we had bought the gourmet hay.

As I was cleaning up the ducky area today and spreading the hay it didn’t really hit me at first but as I was cleaning I remembered our trip.  It hit me like a deluge of pain. It was such a short time ago we went.  Such a short time ago he sat next to me in the car and we laughed and talked and his warm living breathing person was there.

Since my sister was with my kids today I started walking down the road, tears streaming down my face, sobbing, moaning, doing the ugly cry.  The snow was dirty and slushy, cars driving by sprayed me with sludge.  I wondered if it was possible to die of a broken heart.

I actually sat by the side of the road. In the snow. I googled most comforting bible verses.  This came up:

I thought how I had looked at him thousands and thousands of times and never thought once I might not have him forever.  How was I to know that was one of the times I would fondly remember with him, a simple trip to TSC?

It is something I don’t know how to wrap my brain around.  Every interaction I had with him, every look, every word was important.  I think of them like precious gold.  I think what I would trade for one more minute with him.  Even one minute.  I even wish I would have touched him in the hospital, somehow, while they were working on him just to feel his skin but I was too scared.  I didn’t recognize that boy on the table.  I was terrified.  Then he was gone.

Every word. Every interaction. Every minute spent together: gold.

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know.

So…..its hard to come down from the “high”or adreneline of a basketball game in the legacy of your son and have hundreds of people pledge to want to live like him.

Then the next day its done, and you’re like, oh. Ok. It’s done. I hope they don’t forget.

That’s just one emotion.  Then there’s the fact that your kiddos are hurting too, and you’re hurting and sometimes you just can’t comfort each other because you are hurting in such different ways.  It’s so, so, so, hard to just be mom to four other kids after you have lost one.

Brooklyn, Brenna, Bryleigh, if you ever read this do not feel hurt but it is very hard losing your oldest son.  I don’t really know how to explain it but since he was my first born, it was through difficult circumstances, I was a single Mom for awhile, it was just different.  Because he was older we had more time to have “adult” discussions and really bond as people.  He helped me just as much as I helped him.

I feel like I have lost my identity. Being Lucas’ Mom was an identity.  I was, and am, so fricken proud of that kid. He gave me something to wake up to, and say, I am mother of an amazing child.  I am still a Mom but such a broken one.  To kids that are hurting so much and there is no one to fill that role.  I need to try. Harder. But there is so much pain, so much pain. I don’t know when it’s going to get better.  Right now it is more intense than ever.  I love this verse

so I started reading Isaiah 35 and it is so beautiful and healing to my soul.

Joy of the Redeemed

I haven’t even been able to fully process last night- it was so powerful, so spirit filled, so beautiful, I almost feel like I dreamt it.

It was the Holy Spirit.  From floor to ceiling, one corner of the gym to the other, one basket to the next- the spirit of God.  If you didn’t feel it-

you weren’t feeling.

I was simply a vehicle in my speech- speaking of the son who deserved everyone wonderful word spoken about him.  I wished I could make a movie instead- but my simple five minutes had to suffice.

I woke up thinking about Winnie the Pooh and though I haven’t fully grasped this idea- I feel like Lucas drops hints to me through these out of the blue thoughts I have.  I looked up Winnie the Pooh quotes and this is what I found:

“If there is a tomorrow when we’re not together, there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, you are stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important part is even if we are apart I will always be with you.”

I absorbed that into my being- as well as cried many lakes of tears- and decided I must say my speech.  I was going to have one of the teachers read it.  I realized then at that moment- I am stronger than I seem.  My baby boy is going to be urging me on.

He wants to make a difference.  In his life this is all he would have wanted and I (and God) are going to make sure that it happens.  He deserved that.  He would have wanted the message of living life as if it is not your own to resonate through that public school gym.

This is what it said on the cards handed out with the blue “live like lucas” bands last night:

“We wear this bracelet to celebrate the legacy of a life lost too soon.  In his fifteen short years, Lucas taught us more about life than many learn in a hundred.  Lucas’ heart and his gift of loving others encompassed everything he did.  His compassion was evidident in his service in Guatemala, through his loving on little brother and sisters, and by standing up for thoe being bullied at school.  He cared for more about others than himself.  Every day he sought to bring a smile to the face of those who were hurting. He overcame his own medical strugles with courage and dignity.  His loss can never be filled but we ask that hyou wear this bracelet with the promise to carry with you a little piece of him, a reminder that we, too can make a difference.  We can be a light in a dark world.”

Forest Hills Central was inundated with the Holy Spirit last night.

Every student pledged to LIVE LIKE LUCAS.

Acts 4:31

“And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.”

Today all I could think about was empty places.  Sometimes my mind just goes places that I don’t want it too…

The empty chair at the table

The empty desk at school

The locker getting dusty

The bed that no one lies in.

It’s so wrong God.  I don’t understand.  The clothes laying unworn in his dresser.  The place on the bleacher at the basketball game where he should have sat.  Cheering on his team.

Instead we are celebrating his “life.” Past tense.

What a cruel, cruel world- how does it keep spinning every day?

How did I get left behind when he and I belonged together?

I just MISS him.  Lord how can there be so much pain. How do I survive.  I don’t know how I do, except I do.  You never know how strong you are unless being strong is your only choice.  For your kids.  If he is worth grieving over they are worth living for.

I just MISS him.

I tried to have fun tonight- go out with some girlfriends, celebrate birthdays- I couldn’t stop thinking about him.  I wanted to be at home watching a movie with him.

God show your face to me because I don’t know how this all works. Nothing in this awful world seems salvageable when your baby boy is gone.  We belonged together.  I should be with him.

God show me there is a way to get through this pain.  That the world is still somehow…good?

I just MISS him.

Psalm 34:18

“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

“pain is the most individualizing thing on earth.  It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization comes when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself.

Only individuals can suffer.”

-Edith Hamilton

I walk this path alone.  My suffering is mine and mine alone.  God walks it with me but he cannot take it away.  Every morning I wake up and realize my child is gone.  My beloved child is gone.  No matter how much I try to distract myself during the day, and it is a pretty futile attempt, I still have to wake up to that every day.  Right now I’m not sure what to do with that except say it.  I am hurting.  I am walking a lonely road.  I am the ONLY mother of THIS child and no one else can understand that hurt.

I hurt. So bad.

All that helps me right now is thinking about revelation- when God comes to make everything new and everything right.  I cling to that.

Philippians 3:20 “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”

I Thessalonians 4: 16-17 “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of god, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”

This was sent to me in an Ada Bible church email several days ago.  I just opened it this morning- it is called “revelation song”