“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”
Rumi
The last phone conversation I had with my mother lasted about five minutes. She asked me to order paper towels for her, and I did. However, I was too preoccupied and exhausted with work bullshit for us to have any real, meaningful exchange. It wasn’t my finest, most present moment.
A year later, on my mother’s deathiversary, I took the day off to honor her memory and respect my grief. Dead Mother Becky is much quicker to honor her emotional needs. Need to sob in the car? Go ahead. I’ll embrace whatever lessons this grief roller coaster ride has to offer.
The sadness still comes and goes in waves. Holy fuck, this is not the ride I would have picked, but it’s the gift of losing someone you truly loved. There’s a Rumi quote I love: “Grief is the garden of compassion.”
First, the compassion comes for others who’ve lost someone they loved. Then, compassion for yourself. There’s no shame in any kind of crying game. Sometimes you just have to sob for ten minutes.
Compassion for the people you’ve lost who were just getting through life the best they could. Compassion for others who’ve experienced loss.
I have new insight into the human experience. For example, Kanye going off the rails after his mother’s death seems understandable. It’s a shitty and destabilizing time. Yeah, I get that.
Dead Mother Becky is much quicker to see the absurdity in all the meaningless shit we end up obsessing over. Like, in the end, does any of that matter? I think a lot about the kind of person I want to be. It’s not someone who makes life harder than it has to be.
I could spend this whole post droning on about my sad loss or how there are glimmers of hope amidst the grief. The quote, “Grief is like this. There’s nothing for me to fix. I can’t change anything. Sit with it until it passes,” from “Love Warrior” by Glennon Doyle resonates deeply with me.
Grief can forever change you in positive ways.