I had a long day at work. After responding to a few last emails before I packed up my things to go home, I succumbed to a very strange impulse. I opened Facebook. I do this sometimes - check texts or social media or personal email after I finish up everything for the day at my office. It's a little time-sucking bridge between work and everything waiting for me at home.
The first thing I saw was a post from a member of my online widows' group. She shared that it is her daughter's 20th birthday, and before this milestone, the waves of grief kept cresting and crashing because her husband wasn't here to behold their daughter's exquisite young adult self. And because she had promised him to keep the world beautiful and compassionate for their daughter, despite the crushing loss of him. It had been really hard to do that while carrying her own grief.
I paused at my desk, feeling those words work their way into my tired body. Frances will be 20 this summer too.
I responded to the post. I wrote that her boundless love, and her husband's, were so much bigger than loss could ever be for her daughter, who is out in the world doing incredible things. Their love buoys and supports her, offers a bright lens through which to see the world. It felt true as I wrote it.
I then abruptly closed my laptop and shoved it in my backpack, shut the door on my darkened office, and walked down the quiet hall - everyone else was already gone - out into the dusky light of evening. I went home where I was grateful to learn that my son and his friend were making dinner tonight, and so leashed up my dog for her walk with a bit of urgency in my step.
Maybe it was just the stress of the day that quickened my pace. Or the heaviness of my friend's post that I needed to move through. In any case, Ramona was initially delighted to trot along briskly with me, but when she insistently stopped to sniff the fire hydrant a block from my house I impatiently paused and waited.
I sighed. I looked up.
And there was the sky!
Bright pink feathery clouds in the west scudded across a purple-blue expanse. I watched them glide casually in the last gasp of light, as if it was no big thing to be a pink cloud in a glowing sky, as if there was nothing to see here, you people down on College Avenue going about your business while we do our regular old sunset thing up here all over again.
The sight made me catch my breath, standing there while my dog sniffed and considered whether or not to pee on the hydrant and neighbors dragged their trash and recycling bins out to the curb. Here we all were, scurrying about beneath this impossible beauty, these ethereal pink forms stretching out so close to earth. It was not business as usual! I could feel my heart yearning so hard it hurt.
I thought of my friend feeling the pain of her husband's absence, and the pain of all the years of her husband's absence. I thought of Mike, and how I saw the world when he was sick and in the early days after his death; it was so beautiful it nearly crushed me. There was nothing left to protect me from it. Ramona and I walked a little slower, said hello to the neighbors we passed with open faces. Even as the sky began to darken and the glow subsided, my neighborhood and all the people and animals and plants in it beneath the now-gray forms above remained heartbreakingly beautiful.
I was wrong. It's not that our experience of love is bigger than our experience of loss, which thus preserves the goodness of the world. It's that our love-soaked experience of loss, our broken hearts - if we're lucky - leave us cracked open to the beauty and compassion of the world. We see it, we feel it, we cannot shut it off or escape it. We perceive it with greater clarity than we did before.
It is a treasure, all of it. The faces of strangers, the sky at dusk. It glows so bright it hurts our eyes.
Our children learned too soon, a pain I would take away in a heartbeat if I could. Yet they are open to grace. They cannot unsee the beauty and compassion of the world, and now they are living into that truth. Vidita, your promise is kept.
No comments:
Post a Comment