GRIEVING ALONE/NOT ALONE

I can feel the pain surging through my body.

Sometimes it feels like a caving in, an emptying.

Sometimes if feels like my brain has been put on ice.

Tonight, it feels like a restless tension.

It compels me to check Facebook again. Watch another 5 minutes of a Netflix show I can’t even remember when I hit pause.

It feels like, if I imagine what they are feeling tonight, I will be ripped apart forever, and so, I can’t imagine. I can’t feel.

But my heart screams at me, you must feel.

I got news of a tragedy in my family of origin this morning. I want to run to the pain, I want to run to the hurt and the arms of family. But I know I would only bring more pain, only bring more sorrow. I am not wanted. I know that. I don’t know what to do. It is one of my worst fears come true, since the shunning began. Every day, I fight off the fear that someone will die, someone will get a diagnosis, and I won’t be told. I won’t be there.

I won’t get to comfort and grieve with the ones I have loved for my entire existence.

My own pain is brought into sharp focus by the pain I know my loved ones are experiencing today.

“this is a living hell”, I texted to a friend this morning. As I hit send, I heard the voice of David…

“If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!” *

I watched the Osprey fly over my head, carrying a snake back to her young, her wings a silhouette against the early morning sun.

Again, I heard David

“If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea” *

Later in the afternoon, I answer the half-panicked shouts of my oldest child. I run outside to see that my preschooler has solo-scaled a tree in our back yard. I bid my heart stop racing, and calmly ask “can you get down by yourself?”

With utter confidence,  she cheerfully declared

“YES!!! And if I get STUCK, YOU can come up here!!!”

That’s it, isn’t it?

Love beckons and reaches.

Love moves in and says I AM HERE.

Love shows up in the grit and the grime of the bloody trenches of life.

It stretches out its arms, and says

“lo, I am with you always, even to the ends of the earth”.

One lesson of MASSIVE importance for this year is that I will survive the feelings. I used to be afraid that if I felt it, if I let it come into my body, I would die.

I used to think that grief would fling my body into outer space and I would never be able to come back to earth.

Tonight, I power off the devices.

I lay still and close my eyes.

I let it wash over me. I surrender.

I tell myself, “YOU ARE ALLOWED TO BE SAD”.

I let the sadness move through me, and the tears seep through my eyelids.

My phone rings, and it is a person I had despaired of hearing from. Her voice calls out the deeper grief, and I sob into her ear, and she doesn’t seem to mind. Her call is so much more than a call. It is an invitation and a movement of healing. It is the image of the Divine, one we only see clearly in sorrow.

I remember this video, illustrating some research on empathy, and the impact this concept had on me.

This afternoon, I was almost yelling at my kids, in the car. They looked at my like I’m deranged.

“in our family we ALWAYS LOVE FIRST. That’s one of our core values. We LOVE, and we show up, and we don’t mess with each other and we don’t let other people mess with our family. We always, ALWAYS show up for each other, even if we don’t agree or understand”.

Miss Smarty pants comes back at me with “how many family values do we have, you’ve been talking about this a lot” but she has a bit of a glint in her eye, because her heart is hearing what my heart is saying to her. She’s hearing it loud and clear.

“I am your mom and I will TAKE DOWN ANYONE who messes with you and you are NEVER put out of my presence.”

That is who MY GOD IS, my God is the one who calls forth love. My God is the one who comes into the pain, into the darkness. I AM IN THE PRESENCE OF THIS LOVE to the highs and the lows and the in-betweens. The darkest depths of the earth, the highest arch of the skies.

No where will I be separated from this LOVE.

 

 

*PS 139:8 & 9