It’s my mom’s birthday today, as well as just a few weeks past the third anniversary of her death. The experience of losing her somehow feels like it occurred both in another life and just yesterday.
Year three is strange. So much has changed, the world seems to have moved on, but a part of you still remains frozen in the moment you heard the word “cancer” and felt the earth fall out from under you, and breathless from the violent disbelief that met you the first morning you woke up to a world without your person. It is a time of thawing in all the places that you hadn’t even realized had numbed in the icy gusts of the unbearable. As you return to your body, it feels in some ways as though you’re moving backwards. Being in such close proximity to death wields the gift of intimacy with the holy other, and this sense that something profoundly spiritual is taking place carries you forward. But as time goes by, the veil increases its opacity and leaves you not only longing for your loved one, but for the invisible hands that held you through their transition. In the early days, there is comfort in the obviousness of your wound. Of course you are hurting terribly, of course you can’t sleep, of course you are flinching in anticipation of another blow. But as you move away from the actual happening, it is completely disheartening to find yourself once again crippled by waves of terror, chest pain, insomnia, or whatever symptom grief chooses to manifest as in that moment. The growing shadow of distance is shaped by a forgetting of the “why” and an inability to see a way of being beyond what currently is.
I have to continuously come back to the knowing that grief is an ongoing journey, and that as I find myself being bludgeoned by yet another round of processing that tests me to my limits, it means I am now strong enough to feel what had previously been too large to face. Carl Jung said “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order”, and within the messiness of repression breaking way to expression, I have to trust that there is a wisdom orchestrating every move.
Homesick
I miss the three of us
I miss two faces to look up at
two voices in the kitchen
two heartbeats that composed the rhythm of my own
I miss thirteen dogs and two goats
three horses and two pigs
one cat and all the rest
I miss it’s too loud, turn it down, here’s your breakfast, hurry up
I don’t miss that’s once, that’s twice, that’s three times
or slamming my door in response
but I do miss coming back together afterwards, it never took long
I miss two hours of The Simpsons on Sundays
and Survivor on Wednesday evenings
I miss when I saw you as a unit of gold streaked marble
without the cracks that adulthood revealed
I miss five fingers running through my hair
and a limitless supply of it’s gonna be okay’s
I miss two headlights in the driveway
signalling his return from Williams Lake
and the feral enthusiasm of Buddy’s jumps and roars
the second he entered the door
I felt the same
I miss the two of us laying in your bed
and the way you’d hold the heaviness of my day
with the lightness of your listening
I miss twelve minutes to town and five to cross it
thirty minutes to Jessica’s and twenty to Hannah’s I miss the times when you couldn’t help but laugh at his idiotic remarks
much as you tried
and his satisfaction in cracking your composure
I miss eleven Elton John songs and three dozen gingersnaps
playing and baking in unison
I miss you in the driver’s seat, myself in the passenger and him in the back
forever prioritizing the comfort of creatures and his only child
I miss being only five years away from the Great Mystery
that fades into the horizon as we age
and twenty-two away from the day I’d lose you
but I’m grateful for the twenty-seven we had
I don’t know how many days it’ll be until we reunite in eternity
but I will spend them compiling a collection of quietly precious pieces of life
and count my findings out for you when we do
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