The One Thing No One Tells You About Grief

It absolutely astounds me how out of tune I can be with my very own flesh and blood. For real, after 33 years I thought maybe, just maybe I would understand the ebb and flow of my own heart a little bit better. Some how I thought I would be astute enough to know when all hell was about to break lose in the inner chambers of my soul. After these last few weeks, I can assure you there is still work to be done in the intuition department. I didn't see it coming, I was completely blind sided....until this morning.

My soul has been restless; stirring, sifting, churning, with no conclusion and no clarity at the end of the day. And so the next day, I would continue stirring, sifting, and churning. After several days and nights of restless stewing, opining, and processing with no results, my body finally clued me in this morning.

From the outside looking in, I'm sure I have appeared irritable (asked the child I paid money to leave my presence) distant, indifferent, numb, scattered, unmotivated, and aloof. I kept thinking, "today will be different, today I'll turn the corner and my innards will settle." 

My bones hurt when I woke up this morning. As I survived the morning chaos, I kept looking at my feet to see if someone had tied weights around my ankles. Every move felt delayed like I was walking through sludge. Every word spoken felt forced and rehearsed, or worse; reactionary and painful. The back door gently closed as the girls headed off for the day. I found my cup of cold coffee and sat in my green chair as I watched them climb the hill. I sat, I stared, and I went to my book shelf to read someone else's words. "The Healing Path" by Dan Allender is a balm every house hold should contain. I flipped through the obsessively marked pages, pages I had drunk in two years ago when we said goodbye to mama. I reread the words about sorrow, suffering, grief, and loss, and what had been stuffed deep down inside, currently masquerading as a million different other emotions, began to come up and out.

I had been feeling a whole bunch of nonsense about a whole bunch of random areas, instead of feeling the one thing my heart was trying to tell me to feel, "Sara, you are missing your mom!"

Substituting worthless busyness of the heart, instead of intentionally walking through the desert of grief. The desert sucks. It is uncomfortable and incredibly draining. Sometimes so uncomfortable we stir up fraudulent feelings to deflect reality.  But if we refuse to walk through the desert, we cheapen our experiences with self-help and self-reliance. We fill our emptiness with substitutions and idols, only to be left constipated and limp.

I wasn't listening to what my heart was trying to get me to process, and so my bones began to cry out to me. My bones began to bear the brunt of my screaming soul.

Grief can be so damn tricky and bossy, and when it is left unattended and unheard, it spreads like death and muck. 

So today I am attending to my grief. Not fanning it, or cleaning out a guest bedroom for it to take up residence; but attending it, acknowledging its presence and footsteps on my heart and life, and intentionally calling it out and giving it tender space and time to run its course. 

Oh dear friends who are grieving,

I hear you. I see you. You do not walk alone. The banner over our lives will not be penned as loss, but there are days we walk thru that are deeply scarred with it's imprint.    

Tend to your grief dear friends. Take a moment, take an hour, take a day, take a season, and walk through that desert.    

~Sara