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Messy notes from life's injured reserve list
We are mere days away from Mother’s Day and as a motherless daughter who is so far out from the bomb blast of that particular loss that the grief of this holiday is usually pretty manageable, I can tell this year is going to hurt more than it has in a while. Frankly, this week has hurt more than a week has in a while, in so many ways. I have been benched from my fullest day-to-day life by an errant rock in my path, and the inside of my brain has been loud.
I took a bad fall earlier this week. I have a suddenly very sprained ankle and the skin on my knee is so shredded even a bandage on it is painful. I fell asleep the other day holding an ancient leather pouch that houses a deck of my mom’s tarot cards because it was the closest I could get to holding her hand. When I woke up I almost let myself feel pathetic. But my mom has been dead for 17 years, and I am tired and in pain, and when grief says “hold this pouch of tarot cards, it will be like she’s holding your hand,” you are excused from calling yourself names.
You’d think I’d know this as someone who carries other people’s grief alongside them. And I do. I do know that when it comes to every single person I have ever worked with. Every load I’ve lightened, every transformation I’ve witnessed, any healing I’ve ever helped facilitate, is because I know that we sit with grief and not judgement; we sit with love and compassion and the ache of absence, and not shame. And yet, when I have to turn the grief tending gaze to myself, the love and compassion sometimes ricochet off to the side and I am flooded with judgement and shame. I’ve come so far in terms of how I see and accept and even love myself, and yet, some days it seems like there is so much more ground to cover that I’ll never be able to plant it all with seeds of the warm, gentle caring I so readily have available for other people.
In light of this sudden injury, I can’t currently do the labor that during the summer is my main source of income. And so my swollen ankle and I sit on the couch while my brain tells me echoes of ugly unjustified stories of personal responsibility and failure, flimsy facsimiles of the original ones I have archived and no longer have real access to. These stories of being a burden and not pulling my weight and making poor decisions are easily poked through, when I have the clarity to poke through them. Sometimes ghosts seem so real you cower before you realize you can just throw some salt and make them disappear.
No one tells us even when we do the hard work of healing deep wounds, debriding generational trauma none of us asked for but were bestowed with anyway, the healing doesn’t fully expunge the wound. Their scars house ghost-stories that may not have a real way to grab our wrists or sink their teeth, but none of that matters when we’re so afraid by just their visage making an appearance.
Sometimes the ghosts make me feel so full of ugly grayness, like the dirty slush on the roads in March, cold and gross and marred from the clean snow it once was. At these moments I can’t distinguish between the real truths and the lies formed in the exhaustion of pain and grief. Sometimes I wish I could unzip my heart and let everything out fully formed- the phantoms, my writing projects, my business plans, my love and my sorrow. Let it all spill out on the table, vacuum up what I don’t want and sort the other things into jars by shape and color.
In these moments of stillness and pain and having to stop the motion I’ve been in constantly to create and keep up and strive for and build something, I can see all of the places within me that have felt so lonely and inadequate the last few years that I kept looking at and vowing to deal with later. And now, while I ice my ankle and worry about healing times and wonder when there will be enough skin on my knee to kneel in a garden again and work, all of those lonely places are raising their hands and asking to be seen. Masks are off and I’m too tired to pretend they can wait to be examined later.
I think of card XIII in the tarot’s Major Arcana and see how it has transformed me, how it has transformed my life in the last 6 years. The Death card in my most often used deck shows a deer carcass returning itself to the earth, half eaten and splayed open like delicate gruesome art. And that’s what a shifting life is when we let it be, that’s what transformation and change entail when we embark on them. That’s how grief transforms us over and over into new versions of ourselves; we let our delicate carcasses return to the earth, painful as that returning can be.
The ghost stories chirping from the shadows are carcasses that need to be returned to rot and compost. The universe putting a bitchy little rock in your path that rolls your ankle with three loud pops stretching ligaments beyond what they’re made for and destroys your sacred skin, forcing you to stop moving for the first time in a whole year, makes you the carcass that needs to decompose, and decomposition does not happen gracefully. It is ugly and smelly and full of tears, and there is utility in it, but it does not feel beautiful.
How many times can we visit the goo stage of the chrysalis? I wonder if it is infinite. I wonder how many times we need to struggle ourselves out, unfurl our wet wings, allow them to dry before we are in flight. How many times have I decomposed and then grown into something new in the fertile soil of my grief since my mom died in 2009? Would she even recognize the me I have shapeshifted into over the last 17 years? How far have I gone from the mark where I stood the night we went to her apartment and she was already gone? Did she know these shapes and forms of myself before I did? Did she always know all the forms of me, or did her knowledge end with the me I was at 31, newly orphaned on her front porch being held back by a firefighter at the bottom of the stairs?
When I talk about communing with grief expanding our capacity to experience joy, I forget even for myself that there is a landscape between those two things that we must traverse. We must midwife our own ugly decomposition and rot and return, and sometimes that kind of transformation is thrust upon us even when we’re tired and barely feeling done with the last one. The trust we must hold in ourselves and the universe, in the process and the more than human world, sometimes feels like more than we can bear. But once we make that decision, to commune over and over again, what choice do we have, really, but to trust and rot, to return and shift shapes.
My Mother’s Day grief is quiet this year, but ever simmering on the burner of my heart. I have cried more this week in pain and under the weight of the absence of the person I miss most than I have in a long while, and that’s part of the decomposition. I wish for rest and healing that feels clean and soft, and life has given me a different kind of both this May. This rest has been necessary and also full of rot. It has asked me to trust my own praxis, again and again, that this is the path even if it’s scary, even if I don’t know how it turns out, even if I feel broken and messy. I am holding the trust that being with this grief of having a temporarily broken body and an always kind of broken heart pushes me closer to my own liberation, pushes me further into the shape I’ve always been on my way to becoming.
I am also holding that old leather pouch, tarot cards feeling like a tin can on a string across the veil. These are the remnants left that I can touch, the hand that I can hold even at my grown age, as she remains forever missing to me here in this realm. I shift shapes again and again as I move through grief and it moves through me. Ankles and skin will heal, I will be back to work in the dirt and the sun, and I will cross paths another time with a bitchy little rock that makes me stop motion and sit with myself.
I don’t know if the ghosts of old stories will ever be silent or gone. I don’t know how many times I will find my inner self flayed open and decomposing. That’s all part of the adventure of being alive and living fully, maybe. The miracle and magic of these bodies of stardust and water that shift again and again in grief and in joy.
My final note from the bench is that I’ve decided she would know me in every form. In every lifetime and in every place, she’d recognize me. Maybe that can be enough when I am lost in the missing, when I’m wishing she were here to call and gossip and garden with, when I grasp the leather in my sleep and feel the link that connects us. I am because she was, and even when the ghosts of stories are loud and my body is in pain and I am scared because I don’t know what comes next, that truth is the through line to sustain me in my rot and rebirth. I am because she was, and I miss her, and miss her, and miss her, and that is enough.
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