
Unafraid of the Sound of Grief
August 19, 2023They already know so well, how to mend the world with their own hearts. They are both unafraid of the sound of grief.
They already know so well, how to mend the world with their own hearts. They are both unafraid of the sound of grief.
It’s just that way for some parents. When some of us lose a child it hits so hard we just can’t seem to go on living. If the heart breaks completely the body can die.
Grief is different now. I see it’s always been there, invisible to people until we happen to stumble over it. Once you’ve seen it, not just a small dose, but the giant-soaking-you-where-you-stand dose, you’ll always see it.
Doesn’t this little circle of pets say everything? We come in beauty, we pass in beauty. We are all connected, here to revere each other as sacred even as we struggle with loss.
Why do we grieve at all? Wouldn’t it be more helpful for some switch to flip in our brains when a close member of our…
I’ve been working on a bigger writing project, a book about the first four years since Terry’s death. It’s what I had to write just so I could write about something else, anything else. Saying what needs to be said seems to be a requirement for storytellers. I now have a manuscript titled “Wilder Grief”.
“Her body wasn’t strong enough to hold her spirit anymore, so she had to leave…” It’s impossible for me to accept that our beginning came…
The craft of hope is no longer a challenge to me, so much as honoring its value in the world.
What will hold your feet to the ground, when the winds of change try to carry you away? Even through Terry’s illness I still had…
We don’t know whats coming next. But we have each other. And what remains will be good, beautiful and worthy of all of our talents and wisdoms.
“Daddy what happened to Momma’s skin?”
“What do you mean, when she was sick?”
“No, when she died.”
“So you mean when we put her in the Earth?”
“Yes.”
I guess we were all wound a little too tight for a game as potentially violent as croqu
here are times when I come up to wake them for school and they’ve found each other and are so entangled I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. If I go away for a few days I know so long as they’re sleeping next to each other our littlest one will be fine. They comfort each other in ways a phone call from me can’t.
What will it be like, someday, when my children are running through the forest after I’ve died? Will they feel me with them, sharing in their joy?
Its one of those things you do together that reveals who you really are. We were always people who would take the road less traveled, even when it was hard, and find all the beauty that was to be had there.
I don’t know how to process all of that – how to be delightfully pregnant with possibilities and holding grief at the same time? Can I feel all of that without curling up in a ball with a case of cookies, a bottle of wine and every episode of the X-files?
Isn’t it funny that my cure for loneliness is learning to be alone again?
It turns out I’ve been carrying around a floating divorce of sorts. Terry and I did not say “’til death do us part” in our wedding vows. Now I understand why people include that clause. If the spirits are real to you, tangible in your life, does your marriage really end after death?
There is a young man, sitting in jail halfway around the world, who tried harder than anyone I know to escape the gravity of life….
I would like to carry her
down this hallway,
my sometimes tender
often edgy bird,
to lay her on the waiting bed.
The Earth is really a place of great feeling, we’ve just been raised to hold ourselves back from it
This gorgeous young man painted from head to toe with every moment of his Mothers love is sleeping without fear. You know his rest is unblemished, it is still the sleep of young, wild things.
I saw her encompasing all of us with love. It is not a romantic love, its a Mothers love. A radiant, transcendant, utterly pure of heart, Mothers love.
Widower. Thats the new job title. Objectively of course it fits. We were married almost 15 years. The kids and I celebrated our anniversary by…