My Second R.V. Retreat

Last weekend I attended another retreat for Rachel's Vineyard.  I wanted to do a second one so I would be eligible to help at future retreats.

The house it was held at was just a couple minutes from my house, but I completely forgot how close it is after I first walked in there.  From the street view, you have no idea the house is so big.  I shared a huge dorm-size room (eight cots) with one other person, T.  She was from Albuquerque.

There were two couples besides me and T.  One couple was the husband supporting the wife and the other couple was the wife supporting her husband.  I just love the feeling when you first get there and everyone is so loving and accepting.

The food preparation was a little different because parts of the house had no electricity so everything had to be catered in.

My flowers from retreat

The format for the retreat was the same as my first retreat (which you can read Day 1, Day 2, Day 3), with the exception of:

• The priest this time was Enrique - he had a thick Hispanic accent but he was very helpful.
• The rocks we had to carry were all about hand-sized instead of lugging around a burdensome one, and the counselors were more lenient if you forgot your rock.
• For the anger letter exercise, this time I wrote to my mother.
• An additional anger exercise was us forming a circle and then tossing a pillow to each other, and when you have the pillow you say one bad way of expressing anger.  Then we did it again and gave suggestions on good ways to express it.  (I think this helped because the two men in the group were military veterans.)

For Saturday night's "Adoration" (where you sign up for time alone to sit with God and pray for an hour), my roommate T picked 5:00 a.m. Sunday so I picked 6:00 a.m.  At first I was annoyed because I didn't bring a book to read and I already wrote my letter for the memorial service, so ... I ... actually ... prayed.  And before I knew it, my hour was over!  At first I was just thanking God for stuff, like how lovely everyone was to me that weekend, but then I got kind of serious because I was dreading the memorial service part where you put your doll in the cradle.  Even though I was crying, I felt like God understood me.  I also told him I'm feeling like giving up because this grief is going on forever and asking Him if I'm ever going to stop hurting so bad.  Well, for the first question, I felt in my heart that God was saying that it's okay if I put the doll in the cradle because He will take care of our babies till we get there.  I felt that as clear as day.  I didn't feel anything from him about my second request.

Bereavement doll (Claudia)

 The Memorial Service

Once again my therapist attended the ceremony.  In counseling we have been working on saying what I need from him without worrying that he's going to be mad at me for asking.  I've been trusting him a lot lately.  When I first saw him Sunday, I walked up to him and told him that I liked how he felt to me in sessions so could the ceremony count as a session.  (I like how I can yell or cry or say ANYTHING during a session, even swearing, and then the next week I come in and he's the same loving person he was last week, and I just craved that for the ceremony in case I went to pieces.)

And he said sure.  Which is good, because I went to pieces.  I mean, the first retreat I went to, my roommate M broke down reading her letter to her baby; this retreat I did that, and even though it's mortifying to cry in public, it felt good in a way.  My letter was different this time because I wrote it from the perspective of what I wished my mother would say to me (especially those times I was having surgery in a hospital).  When I was up there reading it, it felt like I was the 17-year-old me saying it to Claudia.  I don't care for the letters I wrote at the first retreat, but I actually am pleased with the letter for the second retreat.  My therapist is making a photocopy of it for my file and I'll add it to my blog when I get it back.

After everyone read their letters, we had to get the Certificate of Life and a rose and a pin, and then put the doll baby in the cradle.  I was so panicked.  My therapist had talked to me a little bit before the ceremony started and he had brilliantly thought of something I could say to my doll before I put it in the cradle.  It felt so perfect and healing for me.  When it was my turn for the cradle, I literally screamed, "What do I say, again?!" and he patiently re-told me.  I walked up and said, "I still love you and you're still mine."  I felt it healed something inside me but I couldn't tell exactly what.

The priest had everyone leave the room so they could set up for mass, and me and my counselor skipped mass and just sat in the living room talking for about half an hour, and then he had to leave.

I do believe it was no accident that I wrote the letter from a 17-year-old me standpoint.  All this time I had felt like something was stolen from me.  After my hysterectomy in 2008, that feeling got excruciatingly worse.  And I love what my therapist came up with to say, because even though Claudia's in Heaven and even though people back then didn't want me to have her and people nowadays want me to get over it, she's still mine.