I sat in my car yesterday morning, mindlessly staring out my window at the elementary school playground and waiting for my daughter to emerge from our local coffee shop with two steaming morning lattes. Involuntarily, my eyes focused in on a mother walking her son into school–hand in hand. At once, my chest constricted, and I grew desperate to avert my gaze. Even so, I forced myself to pause and curiously examine WHY this uncomfortable feeling had so suddenly and unexpectedly emerged.
Instantly, I understood. I was grieving yet another missed opportunity from my past. I never got to walk any of my children into school hand in hand, save one–and that child was often kicking and screaming, being drug into school by his clenched and unyielding fist. My four other non-Autistic children usually got dropped off at the curb with a tense “goodbye” while I tended to their sibling, who was far more demanding. Years and years later, I was still physically aching to feel their once-small hands in mine, to leisurely walk them into school and linger until they disappeared from my sight.
Historically, my normative response to identifying such internally ossified grief has been to turn a blind eye and “get over it.” But yesterday morning, I gently encouraged myself to remain in the moment. Yesterday morning, I allowed myself to honor the few mournful teardrops pooling in the corner of my eye. Yesterday morning, I did not gruffly swipe them away in chastising shame.
Fifteen minutes later, as I rounded a bend and pointed my car homeward, I was overcome by the splendor of a magnificent spring morning. After passing my first mountain winter largely alone while my husband worked in Texas, both his presence back home and the beaming sunshine were a much-welcome and needed reprieve. As quickly as I had just been stricken by grief, I now found myself being bowled over by a tsunami-sized wave of gratitude and a sense of happiness that audaciously bordered on EXUBERANCE. I felt so in love with my husband and so excessively thankful to be striving to create our best life together. Newly compounded tears freely trickled over my lashes, and a sob caught suddenly in my throat alongside an alarming question that continuously pestered my brain all day long: If I had numbed myself to the momentary grief, would I have subsequently quelled such effusive exuberance? Did I have to pass through the gates of the one to arrive in the glorious pasture of the other?
That night, I plopped down on the couch across from my husband. We had spent the better part of the afternoon driving back roads of the mountains we’ve declared as “ours.” A general feeling of closeness bathed in the freshness of nature permeated the room. With a fully satiated soul, I cracked the cover of a new book that had just arrived that day and then sharply inhaled. The words on the very first page read, “I’m not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life…There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.”
After lamenting to my husband that I would never write as beautifully as Frances Weller in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, I leaned once more into gratitude. For as my husband firmly reminded me, I seemed to be journeying in the right direction toward better understanding the interconnectedness of grief and aliveness.
“When we come to our grief with reverence, we find ourselves in right relationship with sorrow, neither too far away nor to close. We have entered into an ongoing conversation with this difficult, holy visitor. Learning we can be with our grief, holding it softly, and warmly, is the first task in our apprenticeship.”
-Francis Weller-
