Sitting in the hush of nap-time wondering about the rhythms we experience in our life, sometimes going through an accelerated tempo with regard to children’s milestones, other times it’s professional obstacles, personal breakthroughs and of course those delightful financial hurricanes. What triggers them? Do we all go through them with such force?
This has been a repetitive theme for me, this sitting alone musing. This year has been more concentrated with drastic shifts for our family I grope for logic, some way to intuit what might come next, because if there is one thing I seem to be able to count on, it’s that something else will be coming along. Be ready.
I am not. And I guess maybe that’s the lesson, be ready to not be prepared. Brace yourself to support someone tweeting something tragic, only to find yourself experiencing a parallel event mere hours later.
I am more frequently measuring where I am, not my looks or my finances, but rather my stage of life. I have young kids, but I won’t be having anymore. I’ve been married seven years, not a newlywed and not that long married just the same. My parents aren’t that old, but they are planning for when they are. Death is a frequent visitor, if not to our family, to that of our friends.
I have cried loud, ugly tears in my car during recent weeks over things beyond my control—near misses, imminent passages. Nothing is sacred from loss or hurt and we all carry it on some level each day. I wish I didn’t feel so shocked by it. I try to hold on to its piercing so that when confronted with ridiculous acts of desperation by others.
Yet here I sit, faced with a death we have known was coming, but are not prepared for and pelted with little bits of shrapnel from other people’s hurt and fear. There is a childish part of me that wants to sit and rail against death and the unfairness. Another part of me, an increasingly difficult to ignore part, is beginning to accept this cloak.
Where ever you are, whoever it is you are weeping for and however it is you are doing it, I wish you peace and courage.
I agree, it’s unfair and inevitable. I went through a horrible time losing my dad. It completely consumed me for several years and still does in some ways. I hate getting phone calls late at night because I am always wondering am I going to lose another. We just received tragic news about a friend’s brother who lost his life yesterday morning due to a bizarre accident at work and he left behind a wife and two young children at 33. I feel like there have been a lot lately. I am trying harder to enjoy the small moments with the family. You are right, we are all going through something. Loved reading your Ramblings. 🙂
Oh Amanda, I think you feel more deeply than many, and grasp mortality better than most. Life on earth is a finite thing for sure.
When in the hospital with my Mom I was reminded how the circle goes on, Mom was dying but every now and then the soft notes of a lullaby would play over the P.A. indicating a baby had just been born. Could not help but smile in those moments.
So while someone is crying those ugly tears in grief and loss, someone else is crying happy tears in celebration.
And I think – we all get our moments of each.
Beautiful. I know those ugly tears, and I know that cloak, and, perhaps most of all, the gradual acceptance of its weight on our shoulders.
Thank you.
xo
I think I sat and read that status update a dozen times when you first posted it.
The ups and downs… they just keep coming.
I notice the measuring, too. Specifically marking stages of life. (In this I must include looks, though not the dominant part of that measure, it’s hard to exclude as one barrels towards 50). I look at others and notice not necessarily that they are younger or older (though that’s part of it) but that they are in a different place on a curve of emotional experience. The clock is ticking – not in years – but in chunks of life, one after the next.
Brace yourself indeed.
What I’ve learned (this came to me courtesy of yesterday’s #reverb10 prompt) is that I do not have to be afraid of grief. It is sad and somber, but there’s beauty and grace in it, too. There’s good grief, which must have something to do with letting go. Or as May Sarton wrote in one of her stunning poems, “happy grieving.”
This piece is so lovely and poignant. I experience the same…and your eloquent acceptance of the cloak–beautiful. Painful, but beautiful.
Death and taxes, man. The inevitable always pisses me off and scares me at the same time. I’m indignant and sad all at once, so I totally get where you’re coming from. Though the thing that always makes me smile is when I concentrate on juggling those oily balls. That always distracts me from the inevitable. For 2 seconds, at least.