often i feel my social media feed is just one kind of person after another proclaiming their pain into the void. different guests, endless in their variation, but packed all the same like sardines into this endless, ruminating heartbreak hotel. not a few of them loudly hawking their wares, offering remedies that they and i both know won’t work.
i was thinking about remedies today, as my nearly forty year-old body gasped and clunked its way through a weightlifting routine made for a much younger woman. (remedy, meet vanity.) though i have found that when i’m really at the end of my exertional rope, i’m actually able to envision my grief as embedded in the fibers of my muscles, imagining that exercise will free some of it. let it pass out of me in sweat, in flushing, in trembling.
what is that idea though? that we can shed pain, gradually diminish the immensity of it? instinctively i cluck at the absurdity of this concept; as if grief is a finite, quantifiable item, deducted from by our steady efforts, or the simple ticking of the clock.
heaving through a set of mountain climbers, though, i found myself briefly putting my faith in this faulty arithmetic, my hope piqued just for a moment. what if my pain was just a thing i could dissolve through heat, a fuel i could combust? the thought alone was enough to prompt me to pick up speed, to lean into the fire that might fix all this.
but then, the interval was up. the sweat had been poured, the imaginary dragon vanquished, the closing argument delivered. and yet, the middle aged woman laid breathless on the ground, finding her grief fully intact. without a scratch, even. you know the adage, though: wherever she went, there she was.
so today marks some new understanding for me. that some of this pain is simply that the pain is. that this grief is unique to me, not ever to be experienced, understood, or carried by anyone else. it is the unrepeatable formula of my own childhood adaptations to trauma, personality quirks and weaknesses, stunning strengths and moments of courage, cowardly lies and failures of self knowledge. it is the childish hope – carried embarrassingly far into womanhood – of being saved by love. it is the brutal words and actions of the careless men i have granted access to my heart. it is the balm and the sting of single motherhood. yes. it is all these things, and more.
“more” being an understatement, because this grief is, and i really think this is true, God’s recipe to restore me to wholeness, sanity, and maybe even one day, to vulnerability.
because where do you go when your pain can’t be explained in a blog post, a reel, a heart to heart with your closest confidant? where do you integrate the fact that you will never really be known in this loss, this experience that is closer to you than your own breath and yet maddeningly impossible to truly relate to anyone else? what do you do with the fact that your story is banal, meaningless in that it is past, futile in that the only person you need to understand it, never will. never could. just wouldn’t.
the only option then, i’ve learned, (after trying every possible version of denial), is to let go. i have to leave the debt – the pain unheard, the story untold, the wrongs not righted – this debt of my broken heart, this debt of my future reshaped – unpaid. and why shouldn’t i? as father richard rohr writes, “we must all carry the cross of our own reality until God transforms us through it”.
and so this reality, this grief, this tiny cross, is at once my wounding and my way back to the essence of my true self, the self before the wounding. the wounding is not just a door to my healing, it is the the door to my healing.
the pain, the tears, the unthinkably isolating experience of grief – these are the cornerstone of my joy. without them, i do not find myself. i do not find vulnerability. i do not find love.
i think it’s right to train my body to echo this truth. so i prepare for another set, this time with heavier weights. i sigh to myself, set the timer, and dig in.
may i be graceful as i carry the cross of my reality. may i allow the new shape of my life to transform me into the woman i was born to be.
may i be conscious not to transmit my wounds to others.
may i be given opportunities to shoulder the burden of pain that others carry.
may my grief transform into healing, and may my healing be of use to others in their grief.
to God, chief alchemist of ashes, be the glory for making a door to joy out of my pride, failure, and woundings.
Letters to a Life I Loved 