Hope Springs Eternal

Healing from grief has many faces. Many of them are awkward. Traveling through uncharted waters with no script to follow. And oddly enough, they are maybe the most poignant, ugly-beautiful moments in being human.

All this grief the whole world is experiencing during and after the COVID pandemic, with so many lives lost from it and also the many, many other casualties that occurred in the same time period... Divorce. A fatal car crash, taking a wife and mother of a perfectly happy family. A miscarriage. A breast lost to cancer. Loss of a house from a flood or tornado. Death after a long life well lived. Saying goodbye forever to a beloved pet. These are all legitimate losses. So many of us have felt the fierce claws of grief.

It seems to me on a big, cosmic level, we, the human race, have been shaken up and tossed back into our lives. We’ve been told to create a new normal. And it starts from a real and raw place, from our insides that have been reversed to the outside, to the raw elements.

Sometimes it takes a while to get our bearings.

In my own grief journey after losing my husband, I feel much like Maine's slow-to-arrive season of spring. And a perennial that has missed a few blossoming seasons and has decided this year, to stick its head out of the ground. I am dating. First on shaky legs. Not knowing what I’m looking for out of it.

“What are your intentions?”

I answer this question on a dating app like a child rubbing her eyes with fisted hands, waking up from a nap, whose hair needs combing and breath needs refreshing.

“Intentions?” I have no idea what I’m looking for. In the meantime, I am finding my balance on these wobbly legs. And I see, as I am finding a bit more grace in my stride, there are A LOT of people trying to figure out their lives. They have shaky legs of their own to figure out. What I've witnessed is, the fumbling healing that eeks out of a mess of an existence, that happens as randomly as the incident of loss that got them here, is actually really, really beautiful. And it makes me realize, all the awkwardness and stumbling I have felt in the last three years has its beauty, too. And nothing to feel ashamed or embarrassed by.

This spring, I am waking up and I like all the gnarly life I see. All imperfect. All real. All new.