Part of my “moving forward” was to buy a little sports car. I tell everyone that I’m going to live to be 150, so this brand new Mazda MX5 Miata is my mid-life crisis car. This is the fourth convertible that I’ve owed. When Carol and I married, we drove away from the church in a 1965 Pontiac Catalina convertible. She always enjoyed riding with me with the top down.
I must say, I have been having a blast in my new little car. I felt I needed something new in my life and this is it.
I had only had it a couple of months when right in the middle of a city road, going only 35 miles per hour, I ran over a large heavy piece of metal. It lifted the car up and over it as it banged the loudest noise all the way down the middle of the chassis. When I looked back I saw what looked like a big chunk of steel about eighteen inches long flying off to the side of the road. It may not have been that long when I hit it but it was now.
Immediately I heard sounds in the car and felt vibrations that weren’t normal. I drove it straight to the Mazda dealer and into the service bay. When I got out, there was red fluid leaking all over the floor. The damage was severe. The transmission drain cap was knocked off and the pan was bashed in along with the engine oil pan. The front sub-frame was heavily damaged. The entire exhaust system along with one of the tires was destroyed. Oh, and the front spoiler was cracked in two.
At first I thought it might be totaled but as it turns out, it’s a matter of replacing a lot of parts costing about five thousand dollars (Thank God for insurance).
Now, why am I telling you this as part of my grief journal? For this reason. It’s been over two weeks now and as of yet, as I assess my attitude, I’ve been surprised to find that during this whole saga (which is still going on), I have not experienced one iota of change in my emotions. I have felt no disappointment, no sadness, no frustration, no blame, no shame, no anything! I have simply gone about taking care of things in a methodical manner.
And then I realized why. Part of it may be that I’m old enough with enough life experiences to realize that a car is only a thing and things don’t matter.
But here is what the Lord showed me. When you are grieving the loss of your wife, it is impossible to grieve the loss of a car. It just doesn’t fall anywhere on the comparison chart.
So here is what we all need to be reminded of. Often times we allow ourselves to grieve losses of things that, in the big scale of things, are not worth giving that much meaning to. We need to rearrange our price tags so that we are clear about what really should hold value to us.
