Sitting with Grief

It’s a normal Wednesday and I’ve woken with more energy today and this week than I’ve had in ages. Maybe it’s the new supplement powder I bought online marketed for ADHD, or maybe it’s because the heavier feelings have shifted a bit. I’d like to think that for the price I paid for a couple of tubs of fruity flavoured powder, it’s both. Either way, I’m grateful.

There’s nothing worse to me than being stripped to the bones of energy. The brain fog has lifted too, so I can think clearly again and focus and, finally, I’m feeling the movement of life in my chest. In the place where my blood flows and beats.

And I realise, I’m really happy.

I have a daughter who has found her passion and channel for expression through dance. I know that however she feels, she has dance as her outlet, just as I have writing. 

I have friends and family who are my foundation and I theirs, and animals who brighten the days with their chaotic, hilarious joy.

I have this work that keeps me motivated and a tidy home filled with beautiful, sentimental things. And, most of all, I have a history filled with stories.

My life isn’t perfect, the world isn’t perfect, but I feel gratitude for what I have and those sparkles of colour. I decide I want to share it with Carla and so I light my memorial candle, the one I was gifted when she passed to remember her. 

But when I light it, I never think of her as having been. Instead, I light it and sit with her as she is, sipping coffee and allowing myself to be with her in this moment.

I’ve had to be a little methodical in my approach to this grief. I’ve been giving myself quiet moments alone and away from everything else. Where I sit and think about her and what has happened, breathing in the love I have for her, as well as the sadness. 

Where I simply stop and just let it be.

I allow myself to soften the walls around the place in my chest where my blood flows and beats. The only option other than to allow myself the discomfort of missing her is to force myself to forget she was and is. And how could I ever do that?

So, I sit in these moments, knowing that when I return to other areas of my life, I can be present. When I have to work and mother and adult and daughter and friend and partner and carry on with life as though nothing happened. To rush on with life.

I don’t like this about grief. How there’s a short space when the world lets you stop and focus solely on the love for this person. Before everything rushes on and you’re expected to rush on too, even though you’re carrying heaviness where your blood flows and beats.

It has felt like perhaps people don’t understand that loss wants to pause your world for much longer.

I have found myself learning to self-manage this grief, realising that in any random moment tears can instantly meet your eyes, which you didn’t even know were so close to the surface.

It’s clever. Your body, which responds before your heart even has a chance to register sometimes. And you realise it’s beautiful that it can carry you this way through grief.

How it moves the sadness for you, rather than storing it as trapped emotion, which you know from past experience only leads to suffering later.

As this happens for me, beside bold dancing flames of her candle and in the stillness of a normal Wednesday morning, I feel grateful. Understanding that I can move myself through these rippling waves of grief - loving and living in fine balance with the loss.

Momentarily stopping to sit with her, to sit with me, and simply let it be.