My daughter is learning how to cartwheel. She does not yet trust her body enough to straighten her legs when she is upside down. She feels, perhaps, that if she lengthens to her full height that she will crash down onto her head. My son was born on on his head. He slipped out of my body into a large tub of water in my bedroom (he was a planned home birth) and has enjoyed being flipped around ever since. He is always running, jumping, and leaping. He is always slipping through my fingers. “Red Light!” I say when he is too near to the street. And he turns back, amused but exasperated. His face making the question: why are you taking so long, mommy? For him the practice is patience. For her, the practice is trust. For me, this year, it is grief.
What does it mean to practice grief? Is it like learning to cartwheel? Do the muscles get stronger as you use them? Is it something you can add to your resume as a special skill, like knowing powerpoint or excel?
“You are a rock.” my step dad says to me, via text. This is the day after I flew to Indiana and back to NY to spend 7 hours in Indianapolis so that I could bury my 9th person this year—my step sister, who I barely knew. He says this maybe because I didn’t ask anything of anyone. I used frequent flyer miles and took a cab from the airport and just showed up and held his hand while he buried his oldest daughter. I stood next to my mother, her oldest daughter, and felt the distinct gratitude of breath in my healthy body and my mother’s gratitude for the exact same thing—my health.
Standing next to the open coffin that afternoon, I turned from the life in the room for a moment to look at the body and was struck by my step-sister Ann’s face after death. How so little of the person we know is left in the features after the muscles have gone slack. How so much of who we are is in the animation of our thoughts and the expression of our feelings. I turned, then, from her still face, to the still living face of her daughter, who is nearly my age and has three small children and just served as primary caregiver to her mother. She has spent the last two years rowing the boat across the river Styx until her mother finally took the oar and went on alone. I see myself in her. I have done this too, for my dad. Though I did it for 25 years.
“What a profound thing it is to shepherd them from this life.” I said “What a gift.” She nodded, solemnly. But then, and this is whispered more than spoken so as not to disturb the somber people come to pay their respects, “FUCK.” I said, with a shrug and a lifting of my hands; a how can you hold this gesture of solidarity and empathy. It’s the fricatives she heard not the vowel sound but we both know what I’ve said and she slapped her thigh and turned away from me laughing and then turned back with gratitude and relief and said “YES. That’s exactly it.” Then she cried and I took her in my arms and just held her, while we breathed together.
Maybe my step-dad said I am a rock because I showed up with an open heart. In the midst of this year of loss, I am learning to hang a WELCOME sign on my tired heart instead of the warning DO NOT ENTER or perhaps more appropriately, BUYER BEWARE. In welcoming love, I am learning to welcome death to a seat at the table too; to be comfortable with the pain and the upside down of it all; to straighten my legs in the cartwheel and trust that I'll neither fall nor stay upside down forever. Maybe that’s the practice. Maybe when we think we are practicing grief, what we’re really doing is practicing love; letting it in. Again and again and again. Maybe it’s as simple as that.
Beautiful perspective of looking at grief, Julia! Thank you!
And sometimes, even though we practice, it’s still just a big “FUCK” moment. Because us “rocks” are people too ❤️❤️love you