I have been thinking a lot about grief. And tenderness, and how my tenderness, in protection of itself, shows up as suspicion, distance and distrust. And I have been thinking about these words Judy (Mommy/Iya) spoke during a particularly difficult night after my father’s passing. I was talking, out loud, through tears and strained and troubled efforts to wrap my head around the mental and emotional ache grief can create. I was trying to figure out how to hold my heart in my own hands so I could, in some way, make the unconsolable, consoled. As I was sobbing into the air, begging for an answer to the question, “Why does it hurt so bad?” Judy says,
“How beautiful is it? To have loved so much, to grieve so deeply.”
I still don’t know how a heart both breaks, and sees you through.
The recollection of these moment and these thoughts on grief brought be back to an old piece…
A lot can change in a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a month, a year...
in the dust up of transition it can be hard to see clearly.
we may find ourselves holding on, sometimes just barely, stumbling through, getting stuck, hesitating, falling forward, back.
if we're willing to follow the stumbles through, in the haze we can choose to let go and surrender ourselves to other senses.
it is these senses that have often brought me to my knees, and i find myself kneeling — genuflecting, at my heart's center.
at my heart's center i am led to gratitude, not only for all the good, and the easy, but for the hard too.
as i kneel now, dust swirling around like the snow in a snow globe, i express gratitude for loss, for mourning, for grieving, for breaking.
i think of each — loss, mourning, grief, breaking — as bodies of water, sometimes showing up as slow streams, sometimes as oceans with waves and under currents that come sweeping without mercy or warning.
my time within each of these bodies has and is teaching me how to navigate.
these waters change me.
loss unravels me. mourning softens me. grief leaves me breathless and in pieces, and breaking anchors, and sets me free.
ultimately it is the water that invites me. these bodies that require me to find breath differently and keep breathing steadily.
i have welcomed, mostly stubbornly, these bodies. allowing them to carry me.
i sit at the feet of their waterbeds and say, “teach me." and i am gifted new language.
now, when asked what languages i speak, i say three:
the language of the heart. the language of the dark. and the language of lost ones finding their ways home.
Alice Walker, in her poem ‘When You See Water’ writes,
“[…] water is always itself and does not belong to any of its containers, though it creates them [...].”
Grief does not belong to me. I am not my grief. But grief has changed me. Grief has created a different me.
