G is for Grief

There were many words I considered using for the letter G today...giggles, girls, graceful...each of these could be easily matched to any number of miscellaneous pictures pulled from my brown paper bag.

Instead, I've settled on this one-grief.

When the A-Z challenge first began, I couldn't tell you precisely what I'd find in my photo stash, only that I had a rough idea of the content. I knew there were too many soccer pictures, lots of shots snapped on sunny summer days, and plenty with little girls playing pretend.

I grab an envelope and peek inside.

There, squished between her two girl cousins, is my niece.  A picture taken on a long ago December day when little girls loved Barney and still believed in Santa.

Like grief itself, I feel something visceral. The photo catches me off guard...it sends my stomach rolling, but I cannot look away. I feel a surge of joy but I buckle my seat belt anyway. Like a roller coaster rising higher and higher, I have learned this year to clench my stomach and brace for the familiar drop.

We're told by the experts that grief follows a pattern. We're told there are stages in grieving...that every  single person walks through them in an order that is predictable, yet for all that communal emotion I've found grief to be a very singular experience.

We talk, we hug, we laugh at the memories that have always made us laugh, and cry for a future that will never be. We do all of these things in some combination of family and that helps, but grief is still a dragon to be conquered, or at least tamed.  While its stages may be predictable, the beast itself is sneaky and we each rage against it in our own dark of night.

You drown a little and you come up for air. You put one foot in front of the other every single day until you're months out from the worst day of your life. You think maybe you've found your equilibrium again, and to a degree you have.

Until a song comes on the radio. Until that funny expression you identify with one so small crops up in some unexpected place. Until you pull a photo from a brown paper bag and are struck by the sweetness of a smile and a moment caught in time.

You hold the picture in your hand and realize that you're smiling too.
You admit that grief is complicated...

You know that love is not.