Anne Lamott (and me) On Grief

Just before Linda died I was enveloped by a sense of aimlessness. My head knew she was dying, but my heart was having a really hard time getting it. All the usual things that held my attention...writing, cooking, reading...were suddenly too hard to concentrate on. All I wanted was to wrap myself in something comfortable and familiar. It just so happened that the honeysuckle was in full bloom, and I kept finding myself outside on our deck gulping in huge breaths of its familiar sweetness. It's a scent that takes me right back to being a kid, playing outside in the early evening, and one I had forgotten existed after three years of desert living. I don't think I'll ever smell honeysuckle again without thinking about Linda. The other comfort I reached for was Anne Lamott's "Traveling Mercies". I've read it over and over in the last 10 years and am always amazed at how her words speak so differently to me depending on what's happening in my life. There's an essay early in the book entitled "Ladders" that's especially soothing to me right now. It's about how Anne learned to grieve after the death of her best friend Pammy.

"All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it...I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed--which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace."

We have all these things we say to people who are grieving like "time will heal" and "it won't always feel this way" and there is some truth to those things I think, but I also believe in the power of giving people permission to step right into their grief, allowing them the time to feel the hole that has been left inside them. That hole hurts. There's a nagging emptiness in our family's day to day life without Linda here to fill it.

"And this is God's own truth: the more often I cried in my room in Ixtapa and felt just generally wretched, the more often I started to have occasional moments of utter joy, of feeling aware of each moment shining for its own momentous sake. I am no longer convinced that you're supposed to get over the death of certain people, but little by little, pale and swollen around the eyes, I began to feel a sense of reception, that I was beginning to receive the fact of Pammy's death, the finality. I let it enter me."

This is Liza's first experience with death. I've tried to allow her the space to wonder, to question, to begin to piece together some sort of understanding. Since her Nana died she's been consoling the adults with the wisdom only a child is capable of, and yet her words are a reminder to me that she is grieving too.  Anne's thoughts about her own young son's grief have been a guidepost as we fumble our way along this part of our journey.

"I somehow felt that all I had to offer was my own willingness to feel bad. I figured that eventually the plates of the earth would shift inside me, and I would feel a lessening of the pain. Trying to fix him, or distract him, or jolly him out of his depression would actually be a disservice. I prayed for the willingness to let him feel sad and displaced until he was able to stop slogging through the confusion and step back into the river of ordinariness."

It's become my prayer for all of us, actually.