When grieving is the only way through

When I hold the baby and realize that it isn’t mine and I am not sure I will ever clasp feet that tiny in my hands, there is a small part of me that wants to walk to a building’s edge and simply step off and feel the fluttering of air before nothing else.

It feels so similar, so close to another time when I lost everything and it is the familiarity that frightens me because it was a dream that died, never realized.

Sometimes I feel what others might call me crazy for, these thoughts that tumble over each other so loud that it’s hard to hear anything else.

Memory doesn’t need the right circumstance.

Memory is wanton with her pictures and her moods and all that ancient fear piles high, like dusty remnants of grey children’s shoes at the holocaust museum, signaling a warning. 

It’s hard not to believe that old lie that sounds like truth:

you will never get what you want. 

This bloodthirsty language that never seems satisfied.

This one red line from another negative pregnancy test is blurring.

The longing doesn't seem worth it because while you might know God is good, there have been times when He has seemed unbelievably cruel. There are moments when I don’t know how to hold both equally in my hands.

I don’t know how to live with hope, leaning bravely into that bright light, while all this world threatens to drag me back into darkness, where the sorrow of so many unmet dreams lie waiting to lay hold of me.

What else will I be asked to lose, what else must be sacrificed, what else must be learned or taught and what will make Him salvage me from all this wreckage?

Where does the hope go? Where does it find breath to live when everything dies inside me?

This grief, it isolates.

Who can understand the fury of a thousand nights shrouded in darkness which fill every space where there once used to beat a heart. 

Who can absorb all that emotion, and anger, and pain that wails and howls in a stormy embrace. Who can live through my despair? They will be crushed under the heaviness of it. I absorb this lonely silence until I can’t stand it anymore.

There are some deaths that cannot be explained away. 

There is only the weeping, and the clutching for the answers that may never come. There is only emptying myself out, telling God about all this war inside me, hoping eventually it will carve out some still space for joy to live.

I go walking out into the fall’s yellow leaves, flaring their last color. I try to remember there is a sliver of peace in the world, if I can just fight to grasp it.

It is such a slippery dance, this holding on and this letting go, this rhythm of every day surrender that I have no control.

I walk past a wooden fence with magnetic poetry art the neighbors have left out with permission to move, and in the midst of all this mundane, there are all these words making music:

feed mystery
expect nothing
find the truth
possible on earth…

fantastic miracles.

The Creator of all this beauty still knows what I need.

Everywhere the trees are spilling their leaves making way for some new dream. 

I pick up one leaf and let it fall to the ground, feeling vulnerable, feeling found.