Anniversaries live in our bones. We have muscle memory that reminds us that they are upon us even if we have neglected to note it on the calendar. I know, for instance, that every year around this time I start to feel a tightness in my chest and a sadness, for it’s the anniversary of my infant son Ari’s birth and death, five days apart from each other. And while I had thought, all those years ago, that the experience would become merely a part of my past, it’s very much a present story, one that colors my life to this day with perhaps even more meaning than I initially understood 23 years ago. For the grief I experienced over those five short days, and for the past 23 years, has taken up residence in my body, welcoming the newer losses as they accrue and alchemizing them into the strength and wisdom I need to keep moving forward.
Grief is a powerful tool. It guts us and it changes us. We try to run from it, tamp it down, ignore it, wash it away with addictive substances, or work, or food, or any number of numbing proposals. But grief doesn’t work that way – it reminds me of the book I used to read to my children when they were little about a bear hunt. The family is off to find a bear, but around every corner they encounter an obstacle, whether it’s a river, or mud, or something else they need to forge to continue on their hunt. And at the start of each obstacle, they announce “Oh, no, mud! Thick, oozy mud. We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it. Oh no! We have to go through it!”
And that’s the way it is with grief. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We just have to wade through it.
Just about one year ago, our lives were overtaken by a global pandemic. We were shut down, almost overnight. Locked in, suddenly we couldn’t leave our homes, we were facing shortages of the most basic things, like toilet paper, and those who were lucky enough to have the access had to learn to shift everything about our lives online. People started dying in horrific numbers, and we had no idea where the disease lay, or how we might contract it. Everything looked like a sinister disease-carrier, from the handrail on the metro to the gas pump to the grocery store door handle. We were told not to wear masks, as essential workers needed them, but soon learned that masks were in fact our best defense against the deadly pathogen. Confusing messages, disinformation and chaotic news assaulted our senses on an hourly basis. We could no longer see our families or friends, let alone touch them. Everything we knew to be true was no longer so. And we had no sense of when this new upside down, dystopic life might shift back to something we recognized as normal.
Each of us has a different date coming up in March that marks the year since we had that moment, realizing that our life had just changed at the snap of a finger. Mine is March 11 – I had lunch with a colleague who is also a friend, who laughed when we hugged hello and told me that she had friends who were already choosing not to go out to lunch. As we sat at the table, I started to wonder if it was safe to touch the menu, the napkin, the food. I went home and didn’t leave my house again, except to walk the dog, for a long time.
This sense of recognition that everything you know to be true is no longer your reality was familiar to me. It had struck me nearly five years earlier, when I was meeting a friend for a drink after work and my phone lit up – my husband calling me from his cell phone. Except that my husband never used his cell phone, and I knew, as I was reaching to pick up the phone to see who was on the other end, that my life was about to change. I didn’t know what was facing me on the other side of that phone, but I knew that whoever it was, they didn’t have good news. It was a moment of enormous portent and stunning understanding. Fifty-four weeks later, we were driving to my husband’s funeral following his year of dying from brain cancer. We couldn’t go over it. We couldn’t go under it. We had to go through it.
On March 11, I had that same immediate sense of recognition. I knew that life was about to shift. I knew that whatever was facing us was unlike anything any of us had every experienced. And now we’re here, just about one year later, contemplating what that year has looked like, how we’ve coped, and what our new world order might hold.
We have been broken, and we are in the process of mending ourselves and gluing the pieces back together, as we wait in line for our vaccines and the hope that they will bring us a few steps closer to the reality we lived one year ago. But once those pieces break, once the whole has fallen apart and is being put back together in a different construct, we can still see the cracks. It’s like the Japanese art of kintsugi, where gold filler is used to fix the broken pottery. The Japanese believe that the golden seams are part of the beauty of the new whole, and they expand our vision of what is possible. As songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen taught us, those cracks are what let the light come through.
So I am thinking about this anniversary as a way to extend gratitude for the new life that I lead, with its new cracks and new fillings. I want to mark the day the earth shifted for me in some way yet to be determined. It’s a spiritual reckoning, and a chance to acknowledge that the grief and the pain and the losses we’ve suffered are permanently fixed in the firmament of our lives, with both their cracks and their jagged gold-filled seams. They offer us a map to follow, to blaze a new path forward.
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