“what i appreciate about seasons (even though i’d love to live on a beach where it’s perpetually summer) is that we need winter for spring to emerge. dying-winter-grief can feel so dark, ugly, painful and cold but if we hang in & hang on, new life can rise out of the ashes, buds can start to form on bleak, stark limbs.” –Kathy Escobar
It won’t come as any surprise that I have been a bit focused
on grief and recovery lately. Even
before my recent grief, I was reading about and trying to dig into the idea of
what comes after loss. In fact, one
of the things I have been working on the last few years is letting go of
perfectionism, and with that comes a huge sense of loss. I spent years clinging to and doggedly
believing in some ideal existence, this unattainable identity, a perfect
picture of what my life and home and family was supposed to look like. Even when it became clear I would never
achieve the precise standards I had set for myself, I held on to them
ferociously, desperately.
After Lincoln was born, a huge chunk of that perfect family
image I had built up in my head was unceremoniously ripped from me. It felt cruel at the time, unfair,
unfathomable because I was just sure I was supposed to have the happy little
cookie cutter family I had been dreaming of since I was a girl. So much of the sadness over Lincoln’s
diagnosis was the pain of me being forced to let go of an unrealistic ideal
that had captured and controlled my thoughts for years. I tried so hard to wallow in my anger over
that loss, but every time I held that beautiful baby in my arms I knew, just
knew down deep in my bones, that he was perfect just as he came to us. Our family would never be cookie cutter
again, but there was an infinite sense of freedom in that, too. Nothing was expected of him, or of us in
regard to him. There were no milestone charts
to pore over, no private schools or ivy league colleges to get him into; there
was just this tiny blue-eyed bundle who took our breath away and would show us
what he was made of in his own sweet time.
Most days, I don’t feel a vast sense of freedom from letting
go of the ideal images of what I thought my life was supposed to be. Most days, I feel loss. I feel untethered without those hefty
expectations I had been measuring my life against. What’s left after losing the list of should be, should do, should have’s that
I had been frantically trying to check off?
I think that sense of being directionless is fairly
universal after a loss of any kind. What
do I do now? Where do I go and who am I
supposed to be now?
I’ve been reading this series called Rebuilding after Deconstructing on Kathy Escobar’s blog. It addresses the deconstruction of faith, the process of watching your old faith groan beneath the weight of growth and change, a transition from inherited faith to a personal faith that does not feel forced or adopted from someone else’s expectations of your faith. Kathy describes deconstruction as a process:
“where much of what we believe shifts.
where things we once held dear unravel.
where the number of questions begin to overtake all of our past certainties.
where we find ourselves saying ‘uh oh, our faith might be in big trouble.’
where we lose the safety of familiar communities because we’ve changed.”
It’s
a place I know well, a place I got stuck for almost a decade. It is a painful and unnerving place full of
loss. The certainties that came from
always knowing the right answer, from having everything spelled out for you,
those are gone the moment you enter the deconstruction phase, and their absence
leaves a cavernous hole. Deconstruction,
just like my experience of divorcing myself from perfectionist ideas and my difficulty
adjusting to Linc’s diagnosis, is painful because you have been stripped of your
expectations.
In that sense, loss is
loss is loss. Even the death of a loved one is painful primarily because it strips us of the
expectations we had of shared future experiences with them. Although we have never had those particular
set of experiences, we expected to. We expected to hear that person’s
voice on the phone again or make them coffee in the morning just like always or
rock them to sleep when they woke up crying in the night.
And
when we have to swallow the nasty truth that those expectations will not come
true, it feels like an over eager kiss from a brick wall. It stops us flat. The Rebuilding after Deconstructing series looks at how to move past that sense of loss, how to hold onto what’s left instead
of throwing out your entire faith baby-with-the-bath-water style. The 4th installment talks about finding
what works to stay afloat during the days of limbo between deconstruction and rebuilding, and it really resonated with me, with where I am these days.
When
I started to go back to church after years of being away, what worked was
embracing one of the side benefits of the Sunday morning ritual, a big Sunday breakfast with the family. I still cried
every Sunday morning in the shower and came up with a thousand excuses why I
couldn’t possibly go to church that day (Linc would be exposed to germs in the nursery, Nico would
cry when we left him with strangers, or maybe Sam looked too tired from working
the night before and should sleep in), but I took comfort in serving my family a heaping plate of pancakes and bacon, in putting on nice clothes and going somewhere together as a
family. The church part scared me, but I
held on to the parts that what worked for me until the church part became
manageable.
This
week, a very wise friend shared with me what her doctor told her after the
death of her newborn son. He told her to
find the one thing she could eat and stick with it. Eat Lucky Charms for breakfast, lunch and
dinner if you have to, just as long as you have one safe choice you can hang on
to when just getting out of bed seems impossible. Find that one thing that works, he was telling
her, the one thing that can be counted on when everything else has gone to
hell.
The doctor had no fear that she would live on Lucky Charms forever, though. During the season of loss, we have to find
what works, but there is an understanding that beneath the winter of our grief,
the promise of spring is coiled, patiently waiting to push up through the
surface and surprise us with its resilience.
Or perhaps, surprise us with our own resilience.
Lately
I have been reminded how reliable the seasons of our lives are. The winter of grief always comes as a
surprise, the sense of loss always feels fresh, sharp, unexpected. The return of spring and life and hope seems
unavoidable, but it is no more reliable than the times of winter. My talented brother co-wrote a song called “Glass”
that opens with these words :
“Trying to live and love
With a heart that can’t be broken
Is like trying to see the light
With eyes that can’t be opened”
The
times of loss are written into the code of our inner workings, wired into the
makeup of our brains. Our hearts were
made to break and then heal and then break again. I sense the return of spring in my own recent brush
with winter as I realize my "thing that works" lately has been holding Lincoln in
my lap, feeling the weight of him warm and tangible on my legs, and finding
peace and comfort in kissing the child whose very birth four years ago felt
like its own descent into an endless winter. The product of another winter, the child whose future we were so unsure of, now wraps his arms around me and drags me, with sticky hands and sloppy kisses, into another spring.
And now, just for fun, here's the video for Glass. Enjoy!
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