what healing looks like

She turned to me with her big brown eyes looking suddenly thoughtful and said with a slow smile, “I never thought about it that way.”    She looked away for a moment and then back at me and said again, “I never thought about it that way.”  . . . and her smile grew.

Her baby was only 5 weeks old when she died.  She never had been able to come home.  And in that moment, we simply shared that there is no set number of years that determine whether a life is whole.  If this little one inspired love from those around her; if she loved in return with her precious newborn eyes, then her life was whole – no matter how long it was.  She changed the lives around her in deeply loving ways. . . . and isn’t that what makes a life whole ?

I was witnessing healing at work in that moment.  Her words were the very evidence that suddenly she was seeing another way to live in her skin.  There was light emerging around the edges of the heaviness that she knew so well.  It was warm and hopeful . . . the way healing feels. 

And that is how it works . . . not dramatic, necessarily, or brilliantly insightful . . . but simple . . . as a new, never imagined perspective dawns.   And the opening in the heart widens a little more.  

It is creation happening before our eyes and it is beautiful.

for such a time as this

for such a time as this

       when each moment stands out as irreplaceable

       when emotion can override our sense of the present to such an extent that we 

               feel suspended in mid air

       when tenderness is all that matters

              and kindness is our only obligation

for such a time as this

       Love breaks through our every barrier and

              reminds us that our reality 

              loud and sharp though it may be

              is held within The Reality of Love

              that is timeless

              limitless

              and strangely

              enough

for such a time as this 

permission to be grateful without being happy

What do we do with this season of gratitude . . . when gratitude is so often about feeling happy  ?  

For the grieving heart feeling happy is hard.  So how do we reconcile  devastating loss with joyous  family gatherings around an abundant table ?  It all feels so incongruent.

 Maybe it would help if we were simply given permission to be grateful

 without being happy about it.  There is a distinct difference between gratitude and happiness.  

We can absolutely be grateful for all the delights in our lives . . . all those times when we smile at the thoughtfulness of a kind friend,  collapse into breathless belly laughs or greet some unexpected joy that changes everything for the better.  Who wouldn’t feel grateful and happy for such moments ? 

But there is a deeper gratitude, I think.  

And that is the speechless wonder, the pure gift, of a life that we were privileged to cherish for too short a time.  Gratitude this deep is born of the penetrating grace of memories that take us back to another time when happiness was easy. 

Now we know a more serious happiness of the heart - a profound gratitude that spills out of us through tears.  And this is perhaps the truest form of Thanksgiving there is.

quiet bravery

Recently, our support group entertained two penetrating questions about fear. 

First, we asked,

             “What is it that we fear today, that we didn’t fear before our child died?” 

Some shared the fear of losing themselves in this intense sorrow (“Who am I going to be after this unfathomable pain I’m enduring?”).  Others were afraid of forgetting their child  in all their specific beauty, or afraid for the safety of their other children.  

The second question was,

            “What is it we no longer fear . . . now?”.

And there was one quick response - “I’m no longer afraid to die.” 

I’ve come to believe that these are both very important questions to try to answer with as much honesty as we can muster.  And when we do, they lead us to a place of quiet bravery.  

Mark Nepo says:

“Inner courage produces acts of outer courage.

We are being quietly brave when we open ourselves up

             to feel,

             to see what is before us,

             to accept,

             to break life-draining patterns and

             to cross the threshold from woundedness to aliveness and

                                                   from judgment to compassion.”