Healing

I can see me pulling through, find out I’m someone who

Is moving on and letting go, picking up the pieces on the road to healing

Wynonna Judd

Found this song yesterday by accident…nice to stumble upon it, given that today is an annual day of mourning for me…as I remember and pray and wish and grieve and wonder about “what ifs”. Unlike last year, this year’s visit to the grave was bright and sunny and warm. Beautiful.

Remembering is a funny thing. Some years are harder than others. This year, though sad, had an “ok-ness” to the sadness…dunno why, exactly. I still went to the grave, still cried, still remembered, and wondered at what might have been. But it was easier to notice the other remembrances of love that others have laid at graveside…flowers, notes, teddy bears, even a little pair of shoes…and smile at the notion that others care and remember in their own ways.

Grieving is a proccess of sadness and pain that can result in growth and learning and richness over time.

I brought a book with me this year…a good friend gave me a copy of I Remember You: A Grief Journal. She knew it was coming up to the time of year when there is special remembering for me. And I had a chance to read through some of it as I sat on the ground, surrounded by kleenex and sunshine:

The presence of that absence is everywhere.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I remember the days, weeks and months when that was my life. And it made living hard, like going through life in waist high water…it works but it is so much work to keep putting one step ahead of the other, all day long, and going anything other than “pretty slow” seemed impossible.

And then, closer to the end of the book:

There is a rent, a tear, a rip in the fabric of my life that can’t ever be completely sewn up or patched over, but which lets in both the darkness that is the underworld and a world of astonishing–the only word which can describe it is celestial–light.

Alison Townsend

“Small Comforts”

I think I’m sorta there this year. The rip feels rawer today than most days, as it does every June 18th. But I’m not the same person I was…and there is an appreciation of life, of love, of relationships that I owe to the loss. It aged me…but maybe in some ways, that’s OK. It took away my innocence…but given my line of work, that’s a good thing. It’s OK to be sad this year. I’m finding myself grateful this year for what was, even though it was lost. I’m grateful this year for what is, which is at least partially due to the significance of the deaths and the mourning and honoring and learning and growing that resulted.