My Inanimate Speaker

I have never seen anything that expresses what grief feels like until I saw a picture of this statue. It represents one’s guts ripped out, body limbs limp, feeling like a deflated balloon, a never-ending scream and a heart that feels like it is dying or dead.

This is a picture of the bronze statue by Albert Gyorgy located at Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The statue is called “Emptiness.” When I first saw it, my body instantly reacted with a raw, deep gasp.

I can still feel like a deflated balloon lying on hard, freezing ground. I’m a blob of red, flat rubber, 99% leveled with only the 1% of remaining air keeping me alive.

“I was in the depths of pain. I felt like half my body had been severed and all my blood and guts were hanging out and my heart was so pierced that it was struggling to keep pumping so I could live.” p. 311 My Cowboy Knight, My Boaz “I continued to scream at night and expected the neighbors to come running. Lucky the cat always ran away when I screamed.” p. 317 My Cowboy Knight, My Boaz“I made many trips to my doctor in LaJunta because my chest wouldn’t stop hurting. Pain meds for the hip did nothing for my physical heart pain or my grieving heart. The doctors obliged me with doing heart tests and just kept telling me it was grief. My heart was actually hurting from the grief chemicals my body was producing. I didn’t understand that. All I knew was that my heart was physically hurting and I thought I was going to die of broken heart syndrome. Amidst the pain I remember thinking, ‘I know what the word ‘heartsick’ means.'” p. 324 My Cowboy Knight, My Boaz

This statue speaks of being barren, vacant, hollow, numb and displays despair. Grief may be a normal part of life, but can be a never-healing bruise when repetitive and accompanied by trauma. Attending GriefShare classes for 36 weeks certainly helped me, but I still repeat what GriefShare taught me … “You never fully recover, you adjust.”

This inanimate statue can express my grief, but the Bible has the power to reach my inmost parts. “The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12.

He will mend my bleeding heart by weaving it together and wrap it to stop the leaks-my paraphrase for Psalms 147:3 “He heals the broken-hearted, And binds up their wounds.” My only help … see p. 331 My Cowboy Knight, My Boaz