Grief is a sneaky little f*&ker. It comes up again just when you thought you were done with it.
Last night I gobbled half a bag of cheddar popcorn before recognizing that I was indeed stuffing something, and it wasn’t just the popcorn. Oh, hello, grief. It’s you again. Damn.
While my logical (read: ridiculous) brain thinks I should be “done with this already!” I’m doing things a bit differently than I have before. And that means just letting the feelings have their moment, even if those feelings are quite uncomfortable. I’m by myself in a remote cabin in the woods, so there’s no one to hear the ugly cries, but still my first reaction is to resist. And stuff with popcorn.
I put the popcorn down and grabbed a handkerchief and let myself cry. And you know what? I didn’t cry for that long…maybe 15 minutes. And then I took a bath and washed all that unreturned love down the drain. I reclaimed my energy for myself and imagined cutting all the cords that had connected me to that other person. I remembered that I am always surrounded by love.
So I may not be through with grief…it may rear its ugly head again. I may be sitting in a coffee shop with a friend, or listening to the radio, or just remember something that brings back the lump in my throat and the tears to my eyes. As Elizabeth Lesser writes in Broken Open, “our grief is proof of how much we have loved.” And I am proud of my capacity to love.