"We can sit with knowing that even as we are faced with extraordinary pain and destruction. that the in tact nature of the world remains at every moment. And so does the in tact nature of ourselves...it cannot be shattered. And there is a great shattering taking place at all times."
-Abigail Benson on the podcast "How to Survive the End of the World"
Today was my mom’s birthday, the 14th one without her. Her death was my extraordinary pain and destruction in 2009, and it has stitched itself to the great shattering taking place ever since.
There have been so many edges and aspects of grief in the last 14 years that I have lost count. When she first died I felt untethered to the world, realizing only in her absence how her presence had kept me on the surface of the earth. I felt like I could float off into the cosmos at any moment and I wondered one morning if the earth would realize my gravity was gone and release me into the atmosphere without training or a breadcrumb trail back.
People make it sound like time will whittle grief away to nothing but that is the most wrong thing. Time softens the edges like water buffs the sharp points of broken glass to become a treasure you want to take home and keep. Time shapes and re-shapes grief, smoothing edges and turning it to something different without erasing it all together.
In these almost 14 years I’ve gotten married, had the two kids she dreamed of when we’d lie in her bed and she’d imagine me a mother, grieved 4 dogs and fell in love with 2 more, became a gardener, made and lost friends, learned how to be soft, learned how to love myself, found fearlessness and joy in mundane acts. While I wish she were here to see every single bit, I marvel at the in tact nature of myself which cannot be shattered. Grief appears to come with a hammer to break us but it is always only yearning to be heard, and held, and experienced.
In experiencing grief I also hold hands with joy, the three of us a tiny coven holding each other, able to time travel backwards and forwards before coming back and rooting together in the present.
In 2009 my world was a magical and imperfect mother, slipping out quietly in the night without saying goodbye, leaving me behind to navigate this wild and beautiful place without her, to grieve and grow and love and heal and to grieve again, but not to shatter.
I spent today in bookshops and sand and a freezing lake with the people who form so much of my world now. We watched the sun set and the moon rise. The world remains and so do we.
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