I see your woolen jumper folded neatly in the corner of my wardrobe. So soft to touch and still fragrant with your scent. The bitterness of coffee meets the salty flavor of an ocean breeze. My eyes tell the tale of longing and missing your every word, your every embrace.
Where have you gone? Where are you now? The impossible question bounces around the walls of my brain.
My body is weary with a patchwork of aches. Unsettled nights tending to my babe blended with the deep, dark, hardly-hushed stories of mourning.
It’s in those moments when the world sleeps that the mind travels to forbidden spaces. Spaces that daytime me would brush away with a shake of my head, and then burry and replace with a story much more appeasing and acceptable, because heaven forbid, I lose my stand and grace.
The world is a very different place now, a place of unbridled joy (a baby will do that) and a place of confusion, anguish and guessing.
My natural urge is to fix, mend and do, but a deeper knowing straddles me back in line. These efforts will fall short, again, that I know. Instead, I learn to meditate. Not with my eyes shut and my palms wide, for that I know. This time with my eyes are fully open, and my feet planted firmly on the ground. Living one breath at a time. Intentions are placed and laced, but it’s the reality of being here and present that is unfolding the course.
Here I am, chanting all the light you brought to me. I’m saluting the sands, the skies and the rainforest floors in your honour. I’m absorbing your lessons and teachings, and seeking your guidance as I mother, as I lead, as I care for and protect the sanctity of this life.
So here I am. Seeing them, challenging them, accommodating them, inviting them.
Mourning you and mourning the way life use to be, and deeply accepting the beauty of my power and lack there of.
Control truly is a game. A game our minds love to play and I’ve been attempting to master this charade.
Resilient yet fragile. Bright with hope yet full of doubt. Abundant with gratitude yet heavy with loss.
Mourning. We do it day in and day out. We pick ourselves up, we gather our strength, we turn to what keeps us connected and true. We remember that to mourn is a privilege because a love that runs that deep cuts in unimaginable ways. It severs parts of you you once knew and sculptures an architecture foreign even to you.
And the truth is – we’re not alone.
We’re all doing it, one way or another, and we’re all doing it together.