In the past months, my life has been defined by losses. The major stars that held up the firmament in my sky have exploded and their cold broken pieces have littered my days and haunted my nights.
I am like one of those plane crashes, with pieces littered on the runway and as far as towns away.
My life is past. I just have to run out the clock. My head strains, with my neck fixated only on what is behind me.
My husband’s choice of someone else, devastated me, and exploded our little family of father, mother and child.
My mother’s death from a cruel dementia, made us strangers for several mean years. My mother lived four minutes away.
My sweet and feisty daughter lives hours and hours away and I feel the sting of 4000 papercuts for each mile that separates us.
I awaken into grief and later, I curse the late hours when I am refused the escape of sleep.
Simultaneously coach and team, I bark orders about how to we might win the day. But they are never heard or heeded. And I am left alone at the end of the game, on an empty field, with only rows of onlookers viewing me with disgust at another loss.
I am humbled by the way people used to pay me to help them soothe the cruel losses that extended far beyond the actual moments and infiltrated their lives with enduring grief. Was it wisdom or bullshit I sold them? I’ve lost the playbook.
With the loss of love, I thought I would be condemned to live only in the past. To figuring out the who, what and why’s of it. But grief cancels the future too. It is no more than a calendar of obligations. Potential is gone. Imagination evaporates. I am walking, talking pain, which nothing is going to change.
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But You. We have never met. But I know you. I’ve been waiting. You are closer to a dream than a reality. But here you are. And the promise of you slips unafraid between the sharp crevices of pain that has commandeered my heart and my hope.
My head turns front and center toward the future. To promise. To endless possibility.
I have been lost in the division of my family, yearning for the gift I took for granted and lost. But you aren’t about subtraction. You are all addition.
It took you long enough. But here you are, doing the backstroke in the safety of life’s fluid beginning. You are black and white. You are beautiful.
As you become, so do we all, perched on cusp of the future, ready to change. We will step into new names, new selves.
I have lost, so lost, in suffocating sorrow so thick it allows no light. I have grown resigned to the darkness. But you, you are the light.
You are more than all my questions and recriminations. You are answers. You are exclamations. As you grow, my grief will recede. Not go away entirely, because that’s who I am. But you will have all the room you want — to occupy the empty spaces where love used to be.
You have changed me already. I imagine you blossoming strong in my beloved daughter, your mother.
Grief has shoved over and made a place for joy.
And so, I wait impatiently for you.
My sweet grandchild.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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