11-8-24

The world winnows out the weak-hearted or breaks those with too large of a heart that love them. All too often we love who we shouldn’t, let down those that loved us best, and disappoint ourselves with the missed chances to love well those that we cherish. Sometimes, tragically, without even knowing that we have. Yet so many lives end with questions and pain that at times there are no answers for, no resolution. There isn’t a greater meaning to grief other than the lesson of adaptation to pain. A large number of us are grieving from the loss of someone during the pandemic, a past loss, and now the loss of hope. You might be asking yourself how to move on, where to go from here, and the answers ring as platitudes falling flat in your numb ears.

The trick to moving on is simply the momentum of continuing. Not with a banner, not in perfection, not through a miraculous act of self-improvement. Just forward motion and the refusal to give up.

We create these fragile bonds with one another, with the world and our heroes, that we hope will hold and grow over time yet a simple sentence or action can unravel it all within a breath like a hand through a cobweb. We all know on some level that this is true yet those friendships that we cultivate over the years are part of our concept of family. The leaders and guidance we seek in our daily lives are expected on a societal scale yet they fall short as well. They’re human. Imperfect. Fallible.

We behave in our daily lives as if these people will be with us forever but the word “forever” is a construct and not a truism, it’s not fact. Forever is a perception and not a reality any more than the concept of perfection or the truth or the idea of “better”. That unreachable someday that we hope for while missing out on the joy of the present.

Yet it is a fact that if we live long enough we will eventually lose people and grief is unavoidable. Those losses are not necessarily due to just someone passing but the closure of chapters in our lives as well. Our many chapters equal the span of our life and the closing of each can be just as painful as the death of someone we love. Whether that’s a person, a friendship, or a version of ourselves.

We create euphemisms to normalize these ruptures. References to outgrowing each other as if friendship is a pair of pants. Or that we’ve moved on in our life as if that person is rooted to the spot and we’re a bus passing them in traffic as opposed to dumping them. How many innocent bystanders have we splashed on our route to the destination that we seek as we leave people in our wake?

Why do we never fully cherish those we love until they’re gone? Time doesn’t heal anything, does it? We just get used to the pain like a stone in our shoe or a broken bone that never fully mends right. We try to hide the limp, how we favor a trick elbow, from the world because it will always be the vulnerable underbelly of our thoughts and emotions that calls us out. Tucking away our frailties to protect us from the eyes of the world.

My mom would have been seventy-seven years old this past summer. On these milestones of grief, I look back through photos and videos of her, processing my memories and observations of her life. Some surprises surface from the grief that I didn’t anticipate with losing a parent. For instance, what I miss about her as opposed to what I miss for her. What I regret not being able to give her (a better life, the house she wanted, travel, etc.) and what I mourn on her behalf for what she suffered in life. I find myself reflecting on her regrets in honor of her memory.

At first, in anger at the world for what it put her through and now in consideration of who she might have truly been. As parents, there are aspects of our personalities that will always lie buried to our children not out of purposeful subterfuge but out of the sheer reality that they will never know the younger versions of ourselves or the inner self that is unreachable even to our own psyche. It felt childish, to myself, to admit that I was angry that I never felt as if I truly knew her. Our parent-child bond grew into a friendship once I was an adult but, after her death, I realized just how fragile it had become during her decline with the challenges of her health and my own. Despite all the time together, I still feel there are things unsaid because of the secrets she kept. That we all do, even from ourselves. If only we could have been more brave for each other and shared what we kept locked away.

There’s an urgency within me that has been born from grief and losses. There are days where I find it difficult to keep up with correspondence and balance it with other demands because I can’t stand to allow messages to go unanswered any longer. The other night I found myself up until 2am answering emails knowing that if I didn’t I wouldn’t have time for all of my other tasks for the following day. It might explain my reoccurring nightmare/comedic dream about performing in a circus and being laughed at when I keep dropping everything or falling off my unicycle while failing at juggling cats.

I woke the next day and thought about my dream while I listened to the kids ready themselves for the day. Their debating reminded me of something my mother used to say and instilled in me after I became a mother myself, “I’m a mom, of course I’m going to piss people off. It’s my job to be a bitch sometimes if it means taking care of my kids.” 

Her sentiment was that you can’t please everyone but, more importantly, it’s ok if people are angry at you if they are so in the course of caring for those you love. I’m trying to go one step further in my life now and remind myself that this is true for caring for one’s self as well. Your health, your sanity, your family are worth the risk of angering others. At the end of it all, what else is more important than loving well and leaving a legacy of doing so for those that you loved. 

I remind myself, again, the world winnows out the weak-hearted or breaks those who have too large of a heart that love them; yet, it isn’t that the beauty and unavoidable grief of life? Isn’t it all a lovely mess. 

As we face the next four years, we all will have to make decisions that might put our relationships in question and test us with our resolve in our beliefs. To all of us, I wish strength and patience but, more than anything, I hope we resolve to continue the fight for those we love. If we give into the apathy, the numbness, then we’ve allowed those that rejoice at our pain to win.