When we were young and unmarried and childless, Mike once gently said something to the effect of: Meagan, sometimes you twist a knife in the wound of your dad's loss. It's like you want it to hurt worse. Maybe it doesn't have to hurt so much.
I mean, okay. Yes. I likely was twisting an enormous dull knife in my own oozing grief-wound then. But I wanted it to hurt, because in the hurting I felt connected to my dad. I was afraid of living without stabs of pain. I was afraid of becoming an adult without his help. I missed him so much.
It will be thirty years without him on March 22nd, and eight years without Mike tomorrow.
I started watching The Pitt last night. (An aside: whoa). Anyway, after seeing lots of up close and personal stab wounds and incisions, I am happy to say with utter confidence that I no longer push or twist any knives in my heart.
Eventually I learned that I don't have to poke at and reopen something from my past in order to connect with it, because losing a beloved person isn't a singular event. It's a river that courses through my temporal physical spiritual body, where it has become integrated into the landscape. It's a stream of tenderness that moves through me and never stops. Clear water that can be shockingly cold, quietly burbling, hard to wade through, or relieving on a hot day.
I have lived my entire adult life with the cracked-open pain of grief. Who would I be otherwise? It's impossible to know, and who cares anyway? I like the person I am, easy tears and all. A throughline of loss connects me to the true nature of people, things, reality: all of it laden with love, complicated, never all one thing but containing so very many things, reminding me that time and touch and other people's eyes are mysteries impossible to fully pin down with words.
So yeah, no knife twisting required. If anything, my intention these days is to simply widen the channel. To try to welcome rather than get mad at the river when it unexpectedly overflows its banks. Like the ancient Nile (so many history podcasts in our family, forgive me) that flooded annually, leaving renewed fertile soil behind that supported an incredible civilization for thousands of years.
(I really can't stop with this metaphor, I am caught in its relentless current, somebody sit on my fingers...! No? Okay, fjording ahead.)
My children and I keep moving farther away in time from the day Mike died. It definitely freaks me out. When I notice the vastly different developmental moment we are now in, it's scary and discouraging - we are being further separated from one another and I can't make it stop. But then the river swells with the sorrow of love, as it always does in March particularly, and connects me to the child and woman I used to be, and the woman I will become, and to the people I love with a fathomless depth that have shaped me to the core, and I am reassured.
The panicky objections subside. There's nothing to fight or grasp at. I just have to allow this sun-and-shade dappled river to flow freely, and trust it won't break me.
I stopped at Mike's tree on the walk to work today. The sun was shining. There are tiny buds on its spindly branches! I rested my hands on the solid warm trunk, and felt my heart stretch - with missing Mike, and with gratitude for a more peaceful grief.
May all our nurturing tender rivers flow and flow, connecting us to one another, living and dead, and the vast ocean beyond.
