I am sharing something that I wrote as I was coming out of a period of my own life that was filled with grief. You might find words and validation about your own journey, or understanding for another’s by hearing about mine. Everyone experiences grief differently, there is no right or wrong way to grieve. For most of us, the period of intense mourning lightens eventually, I wish this lightening for all who are grieving right now and for those we love.

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Scrubbed Away

Grief scrubbed away who I used to be. Grief, along with the desire to forget, and the ability to let go of certain things, has changed me. I have been scrubbed clean to the raw unknown dimensions I had thought only belonged to youth. Who knew grief could make us new? Who knew grief could undo us, wash us clean and then recede into the past while we discover the pieces of us left, what remains, but mostly the unknown territory of what used to be “us”. I look around me now and begin to marvel. All is remade. Even the old that remains has a fresh coat of paint and is unfamiliar and changed somehow.

Who knew grief could make us new? Who knew grief could undo us?

I will not actively mourn the past few years or the people they took with them any longer. I am joyful to be beyond it. The joy feels new too, I had forgotten how it felt, the heart beating, non-bereaved.

For me, with the dawn of life beyond loss, comes a fury of energy. I rip up the jungle of what has become of my garden, I haul van loads of objects purged from our home. I try not to linger on the  amazement and shame that I feel as I take stock of the trappings of my life. I am shocked at the circumference of a weed and the awareness of the time it took for it to grow that thick, right beneath my eyes, unseeing. I do not count the accumulated mason jars taking up an entire shelf in our pantry as I load them into the box for the thrift store. I am a machine. The machine of progress. I feel, but I am not made only of feeling any longer. I can step forward at last, the numbness is wearing off.

I don’t know what I will find under these piles of belongings, within the forgotten frame of my garden. All I know is that it is time to dig into, to discard, to slough off the layers that have draped themselves around me while I grieved. It is time to get to know the shape of me now, now that I feel the call to re-emerge. I am scoured clean, tottering out of all that attempted to bury me.

I feel, but I am not made only of feeling any longer.

It is determination I feel behind my actions. Determination to live. These cobwebs that have gathered around me belong to what has been. A sad truth that is true no longer. I step into my life again, with a massive pair of pruners and I start cutting. The old shape of things is lost forever, I couldn’t find it if I tried; but I can build and create and coax to life something new, and new I will have.

I am more at peace than I have ever been with the changing face of life. Inevitable are the seasons, the occasional devastation. Inevitable the dawn, and the buoyancy, thank God, of my own heart.

I know the weight now of too much loss and the revelation of rising up, at last. I know this is life. Life is a poem, a song, a melody in motion. It is bitter, and it is sweet. I will take this life. I will take the seed of it into my ravaged heart and marvel always, as life unfurls itself- into soil, into storm, into the great unknowable future.