13/08/2025
Sometimes we just need to bend to the undulating musings of our inner life. Today, I am leaning into a reappearing teacher, death, actually, one of the greatest teachers of all.
Death's grief is a doorway no one wants to cross.
Still, we do. Not once, but again and again.
It’s not a choice, not really.
Grief doesn’t only take what you love.
It takes parts of you.
And it does not bow, or ask, or wait for your consent.
About 8 months ago now, the morning after my beloved sister crossed the threshold, I stood in the shower like a statue. The water ran too hot, but, numb to the marrow, I stayed. Trying to remember how to be a person without the gravity of her eyes locked onto mine, desperately searching for answers to her 'why'. I failed to ever have a reply that felt comforting to her or myself. Her disturbing mantra "Home, Christmas" broke bones in my heart I never knew I had. Talk about trauma, her's, ours.
I wasn’t weeping. Not yet. I was scraped clean. Hollowed.
People came with their kind eyes and careful words, offering “healing” like it was a tidy port in a storm. But there was no port. There was only the vast and ambivilant sea. And the understanding that grief doesn’t leave you; it bloodywell moves in.
This wasn’t my first major loss, which only meant I knew the terrain… and that knowing brought no comfort. None. I could not help myself from inviting earlier grief to feast at the table.
Time had no shape. My reflection looked like someone else’s face.
And still, grief spoke. In the silence after the phone went quiet. In the way ephemeral December sunlight lay itself on my skin.
One night, sleepless and undone, I felt her hand slip into mine, the way I'd done to her while she lay in that hospice bed.
"You’re still here. Live for both of us now," she said.
Her message slipped from my hands like a heavy wet slippery stone into deep water. How does one live for two?
I began to see grief not as an intruder, but as a long-staying elder.
It wasn’t here to move me on; it was here to keep me company until I became something else.
We are all a work in progress.
Let's remember to be kind.
