My big boy is gone for the summer, this time until August and although the Hawaiian trip delayed the pain of longing, upon my return to Colorado and his empty room, my heart aches. Since he was four years old, I have practiced "saying good bye" and though the pain is duller now and I no longer pace his room, tears streaming down my face with the fierce longing of motherhood, for weeks on end. I miss him. His tender hearted presence and gentle energy. His slow smile and deep thinking. He is growing up and sometimes it feels like a string of goodbyes within a continuous stream of love so large that all our tears have room to fall.
Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the
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