I took the afternoon off, and went for a hike.
It was a perfect breezy green kind of day. There were wide expanses of gray rock along the trail, and the sun made undulating shadows of the still-leafing treetops upon it like the shadows cast by suspended schools of fish moving with the tide on the sandy bottom of the ocean. I didn't see another soul, so I could stretch my sweaty arms wide, and move at the speed I wanted (rather than the pace I sensed the person in front or behind me preferred), jump off a big boulder for no reason at all, pee indiscreetly, wonder if the turkey vultures circling overhead were there for me, and generally let my thoughts move around like those gentle shadows in the breeze.
I thought of my dad, and how he loved to crash around and yell in the sacred quiet woods. He'd run off the trail looking for a burnt-out dead tree he could easily topple with a triumphant grunt, his inner five year old who reveled in destruction and breaking rules on delightful display. Sometimes he'd holler like Tarzan. You couldn't help but smile.
Dad, I said, as I walked around a bend and was caught off guard by a beautiful window in the trees that opened onto the Susquehanna River below. Dad, my life has been so defined by loss. I'm not sure I like that very much.
I'd been thinking of his unguarded, irrepressible him-ness, and those moments of ebullience when it would overflow. The unexpected view of the river and the birdsong and breeze gave me a tiny moment of that, my me-ness. It was like a tearing open, though the torn pieces quickly began to knit themselves back together. I've been seeing so much through that alone-filter lately.
My first post-loss relationship ended about six weeks ago. It concluded with kindness and care, which felt very right, but it left me with a renewed attunement to my widowhood, my outsider status. Oh, right. I don't hang out with other couples because I'm not part of a couple. I don't fit. So there's that, plus the more encompassing emergence we are all finding our footing in together, rejoining other humans after such a long time apart. It was just me and my kids and those closest to us defining what's 'normal' for such a long time; now we're returning to the larger community whose default mode is couples and parents, summer camp forms in which to fill the names of parent #1 and parent #2. School events and concerts where families stand in groups, and mothers and fathers exchange knowing glances over their childrens' heads. We had a long break from all that. I think I forgot we were weird.
I mean, not really. We're totally weird. And not just us; we all have our outlier moments of not-belonging.
But there's nothing quite like grief to rudely pull you out of the flow of everyday life. And have there ever been more people grieving a recent loss around the world at the same time? All of them - all of us - standing just outside things, struck by the raw strangeness of living and dying. I think of that a lot. The collective sorrow that must be rippling, unseen, just below the surface.
But Dad, geez. Must I be so freaking melancholy, even on this perfect day? Ever anticipating and mourning endings? I wish you were here to reflect and shine back the rest of who I am. You were so good at that.
How do we hold the endings, honor the people who should be here with us, and make lots of room - big sky, endless vista-style room - for joy? Abundance? Ferocity? For Tarzanian outbursts and laughing too loud, for never-having-been and never-ever-being normal - in the best possible way?
For wonder at being the person you are in this very place, in this very moment?
Luckily one doesn't really need to know how. Because when I think about it I see that life, unburdened by sorrow, bursts through with a kind of unpredictable regularity. I feel it. On a walk with the kids, in the kitchen listening to music, when a new poppy muscles it's frilly wild orange skirts out of one of those tiny furry pods in the backyard. Good lord, how do they do it? It's incredible.
I don't want my life to be defined by loss, to see through the loose fibers of a shroud. I want it all to be clear, sharp, and brilliant.
