On the fifth day of grief, my feet are cobblestones, walking ancient paths.
I wonder if part of the grieving process is the other also letting go, a separation, gently, roughly, tenderly, kindly, agonizingly painful separation of paths.
Both stand at a crossroads, and then, how do we let go?
As we gather in connection, I wonder if the one who has passed is beckoning us together, gathering us like flowers into one bouquet and for a time we share a vase, in gathering, a vine.
Good question! Do both need to let go? How do we let go and also believe that we are connecting in love?
Your post reminds me of Marion Oliver’s poem on Blackwater Woods-
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I think both need to let go. I felt my father stayed around until my mother was able to join him thirty-six years later. They were eternally tied. Each relationship is different. What I feel now is that a piece of me is going off with my brother, just a piece, and of course his major tie is with his wife, children, and grandchildren.
I think though as we did with Mitchell, we give them permission to go and we honor their new ways to fly – caterpillar to butterfly – we allow, even encourage their flight, and in that, is even more expansion of the love we all share. There, is Grace!
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Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver
In Blackwater Woods
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Elaine,
This is the most amazing of poems. Yes, she captures it perfectly and beautifully. Yes!
I think now of the Book of Hours. This is a poem for me to read every hour now for awhile, until I feel a clearer letting go. Right now, my heart is in a push-pull. It’s like flying a kite. I’m not ready to let go of the string and I pull it close and let it out a little bit, and back and forth I go, until one day, the kite floats free.
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