This week, I have had two breathing days where my lungs seem to be able to expand more fully. I have felt more functional than not these last three days. I have been eating more regularly and had three nights of 6-8 hours of sleep. I have been sleeping in our bed since Sunday, and dreaming more often, sometimes of him. I sat in the sun yesterday with my feet in the pool and visited with a friend who came by after her work day. We talked about out lives and shared mutually. We laughed together. After standing on the threshold between the kitchen and the living room trying to decide if I could, I made myself a cup of coffee the way he used to make it for us.

I have begun scheduling clients, only one or two a day. Relationships with my clients are important to me. Not tending relationships, personal or professional, feels like another loss. Being present and holding space for others is what I do, and it gives me purpose. I know my capacity is less than it was, and I know I can hold space for others. I have been practicing when moments organically arrive.

I am not calling this progress. Progress is linear and goal oriented, and grief is neither of those things. These happenings are the truth of where I currently am on this walk into the unknown. It is important to not skip over the beautiful parts. The light and dark, the beauty and pain are part of the paradox that lives within the liminality of the in-between tangle ball of grief and loss.

Grief is both/and. It is death and birth, destruction and creation, and chaos and order. These enigmatic states oscillate and collide with their opposing form. Within the absurdities and inconsistencies of this messy in-between are conflict and resistance, and an impossible settling into either death or birth. The tug of war within the self has many ends to the same rope. Trying to choose a place to stand, rebirth or its reverse, we pull against ourselves until the knot of threadbare twine breaks. We fall back into chaos, grasping at the life lines of hope or despair to start again, to find some order to it all. There is no ground beneath us in the liminal state of change.

So, I return to the present moment. I know I am where I am, and that it is not a permanent state. Nothing lasts exactly as it is. I count on change.

I do not know what today will bring, but for the first time since Edmond died, I plan to take a long walk at Blue Hole with two friends. Blue Hole is our local park where E and I often walked together with our dogs and children or just the two of us. Blue Hole’s trail system has Jack-and-Jill paths that branch off from the main path. I have always preferred these because they are less trafficked and go deeper into the wooded parts of the park. I have shed a lot of tears and heartache on the trails at Blue Hole. Those walks have peeled back layers of grief and pain. The nature beings show up and support what is needed. I have offered gratitude for time to walk and laugh with my partner among some of the most beautiful parts of the landscape where we live. It is on these quieter more remote trails that I hear myself a little more clearly, messages and prayers are exchanged. In times of confusion or conflict, I sometimes find the next clue, like a bread crumb, left for me perhaps by someone ahead of me on this path.

At the end of 2022, I turned 50 on Thanksgiving day. It was a blessing to spend the day with my husband and children, and it was bittersweet knowing my friend who had battled cancer for years and who was still in her 40s would not make it to her next birthday. In fact, she died the day after my birthday.

Between December and January, three more deaths occurred. It seemed like a mass exodus of sorts. So many vibrant, light-filled, contributing people died. How would the world ever make it without them? End of life celebrations wove their way into our calendar that before had been a tapestry of baseball, friend dinners, community events, and holiday gatherings. There was so much loss in such a short time frame for us personally and for several of my clients.

I wrote this poem in December. I remember when the words started to come through. It felt like a message to be transcribed about how the path projects and winds through the territory of grief over time. I thought it was a reminder to myself and a way to support my clients through the early unfolding of loss due to death. It was a boiled down reduction of my own learnings based on personal and professional experiences. And, it was something more.

The Grief Walk

*What I have learned from grief is to*
*Allow the waves of grief to wash over me*
*to work on me*
*After the waves crash*
*The receding water makes evident what is left of this life*
*And what is gone*
*In the beginning*
*The crash of the cold heavy water hurts*
*Crushing and terrifying*
*The beach seems bare,*
*all taken back by the great sea that birthed it*
*In grief*
*Something always feels unfinished*
*Like this poem, it is imperfect, raw*
*The pattern is that there is no pattern*
*Only inconsistencies*
*Taking me over and pulling me under*
*In the beginning*
*I try to remember how*
*Over time I find the rhythm*
*That is part of who I am becoming*
*The willingness to release it*
*In fragmented pieces*
*In its rudimentary form*
*Mannerless, unrefined, clunky, and desperate*
*It makes its way into my bones*
*The sorrows of realizing*
*We don’t always know the last time*
*Is happening*
*The last time I carry a child*
*Before they’re too heavy and grown*
*The last time we hold hands and cook together*
*The last kiss*
*That was more than the first*
*I know one day I will long for the bittersweet wave to wash me clean*
*I’ll long for the connection to what is no longer here in physical form*
*I will even long for the rawness of the first moment*
*You were no longer here*
*Like the first kiss*
*I will walk the shoreline*
*Between this world and the other*
*I will notice how*
*As the waters retreat*
*The shells and gems sparkle*
*Half buried in sand and time*
*The subtleties of what grief reveals is hard to remember in the beginning.*

I remember trying to work out the parts about grief being like a kiss. I spoke to Edmond about it for a long time in the spa one night. Often, being in water helps clarify things for me. I turned the words and images over in my head and out loud, not sure if I would find the right phrasing to capture what I meant, contemplating leaving the kiss out completely. I was not even sure I knew what I meant. The images about this part of the poem, about first and last kisses and early and evolved grief, were out of reach. Their relatedness was unclear and their dance was uncoordinated in my mind. It was a whisper of something I could not fully know or feel or see. Edmond told me I would know, and the part about the kiss belonged in the poem. He told me I would find the words to say what was ineffable.

I read this poem now, and I am astounded. It was bread crumbs I left for myself ahead of myself on the path, somehow. The whole section about not knowing the last time something is happening: holding hands, cooking together, kissing; it feels prophetic. How could I have known? How could any of us have known this is where we would be four months after I found the words good enough to express what I meant?

I hope it means that if I was contemplating not knowing the last time might be happening, that I was doing it all with intention and presence: holding his hand feeling every finger interlacing with my own, cooking side by side appreciating our dance of a co-creating a meal, and kissing him with every ounce of my being. The subtleties of what grief reveals are so very hard to remember in the beginning. Still in the middle of its vast sea, I cannot yet see the shoreline.

Bread Crumbs