It has been seven months since my mom passed away and I have done a bang-up job of pushing sorrow aside by distracting myself. Some of those distractions came just by virtue of the fact that she died exactly at the beginning of Drew's last high school baseball season and a furious run to try to repeat a State Championship, his senior year and graduation, Kyle's graduation from the Univerity of Tennessee and his starting a job in Nashville and Joe's getting a graduate degree and starting a job in Spartanburg, South Carolina. All glorious, wonderful distractions. The vocation I chose to be the most important in my life was and is the raising of these boys. It is what my mom modeled so well. My sister and my aunt were in my ear these months constantly reminding me not to miss these moments - imploring me to recognize that they were worthy of celebration. It is what my mom would have said, too.
As we moved into our first fall without school and sports schedules, Steve and I found ourselves filling our calendar with all manner road trips and flights in just a span of a few months. We went to two concerts, flew to Boston and Texas and road tripped to South Carolina and Tennessee.
I have celebrated. I have laughed. I have danced at Nashville bars and sung at the top of my lungs at concerts. I have cheered in the stands of college football stadiums packed with fans. And I have deep gratitude for the way God has sprinkled true joy into this season of loss and change.
There have been moments in between- even hours maybe - when sorrow shows up. It will hit me like a truck. It feels like a literal blow to the gut when I least expect it. And sometimes - rarely - I will sit with it for awhile. I will try to pray. I will try to feel my mom. But most of the time, I push it away. I distract myself with work or podcasts or books or exercise or chips and salsa or netflix.
During one of those moments recently as I was listening to a podcast, the guest recited a poem by Mary Oliver. Oliver humanizes Sorrow. She imagines Sorrow as a little girl. And it occurs to me that Sorrow has been at all the celebrations with me. She has been at the concerts and the football games and the family dinners. She has stood beside me as I hung pictures on the walls of Kyle's apartment and made Drew's bed in his dorm room and filled Joe's new kitchen with silverware and dishes. And she lay in the bed and cried with me on the morning of Drew's graduation party when I didn't want to do it without being able to send my mom photos of the boys. And then she kicked me out of the bed and took all the grief upon her and I sucked it up and washed my face and re-applied my make up and went downstairs to greet the guests and celebrate.
Sorrow won't leave me. She is waiting for me and perhaps it's time I acknowledge her for more than just a few moments at a time. I am at Lake Anna this weekend and woke up to the most beautiful view this morning. It is a place where I have found joy and celebration and peace for almost two decades. Often with my mom. Sorrow waits for me here, too. I think she and I will spend some time by the water today. Have a blessed weekend, friends.
Mary Oliver: Love Sorrow
Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,
what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so
utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment
by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,
as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.
Mary Oliver, from Red Bird
2 comments:
EXACTLY this.
I understand.
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