Grief: A Labyrinth of Sorrow and Grace

There are moments, here and there, when I catch a glimpse of my mother in people. It’s in the shape of someone's lips, or the curve of their nose, even the small dip in the middle of the chin, a mark they deem as an insecurity or flaw, but they are unaware of the gravity of it and its irrevocable tug on me. It’s a strange concept, the parallelism of grief and gravity, how an unbearable affliction of loss can root you so deeply into the Earth’s surface, the epiphany of what it is to be human cements itself and settles into your core–made from dust and to be returned, a fragile and fleeting experience. It’s a strange concept, a person, oblivious as they stand in front of me and I’m motionless, stuck between the space and time of how they are the only living proof of a person’s existence they have never encountered. 

I have convinced myself I have grieved all there is until the milliseconds between mundane moments and the weight of who she was and how I will always find her in everyone, in everything rushes into me in insurmountable waves. 

chérie.

When you are twelve, people think it is unfathomable to absorb the world beyond a game of hopscotch or an “earth-shattering, world-altering” middle school crush. Yet, I have etched every feature of my mother by memory without intention. The quiet moments of grief, people don’t confess to, when the intricacies of someone withers, the sound of their laugh or how they used to scrunch their lips when provoked diminishes. Still, it can drown you in a sudden hit, a rush of dopamine from a glimpse of a passing stranger, a wave capturing you from overhead and taking you into its nauseating current.

Then you realize, 

grief was never temporary 

it’s the only constant. 

(Grief) has lived with me, a soft head to rest down on a neighboring pillow after dusk and cold arms to entangle and coax me into sleep. Alongside me, we compare our shadows, an overbearing loom, and a timid cowering girl; a silent linger and a dull ache. A tear-stained cheek she does not wipe or console, she reminds me this is the nature of who she is–the very concomitant of life. 

A whisper, “Life is not fruitful if you have never experienced a presence great enough to elicit mine in return, child.” 

I diagnosed grief as punishment in my naivety and resentment. 

Grief’s low (all-knowing) chuckle, “God does not punish without design. The fragility of your heart and mind is shown in your need to misconstrue the true meaning of me,” Faint words, “the true punishment is to have never loved anything in abundance, to never be presented with the great opportunity of fear (of touching something precious enough to slip between your fingers).” So, I say, what ‘punishments’ of God are not blessings. I have let go of sorrow; the kernel of my grace sprung from grief and my ability to live through to the other side of it. (Grief) has seen me young-minded, desperate, and in anguish, but she would think of me as a wiser woman now. She holds my hand and tells me she’ll never go astray, and I intertwine my fingers with hers, hold on, and appreciate the presence of who she is. 

A soft, sweet love letter to my home and the cascade of dissolution and life it has given me. A fracture of a blessing and a curse.

It’s a habitual human instinct to speak of grief in a former tense. A person is to grieve after they have lost the irreversible place or person the grief is rooted in. Rarely do I hear people talk about mourning amidst loss, a slow descent into the ware of time. It’s never been an easy or gentle feat to mourn but the experience of grief and the unbearable weight it lugs on the spirit is more digestible when a person does not have to look it in the eye day to day when it is not felt in the slouch of your shoulders or seen in the hesitance of your step into the doorway. 

I mourn deeply for the house I grew up in. 

Old and worn, a red barn behind its sullen shape, my grandfather’s sacred workshop growing up. 

No one composes a plan or set preparation for when a place once considered sanctuary becomes a stockade; an entrapment of all the muddled variants of the person you have been. When the walls that guarded you at eight from the invisible monsters in the dark turn into a barrier of the past you have to unfurl to understand who you are. They hold too much knowledge, they have seen more than monsters that torment the imaginative mind of a young and naive child, and it is nauseating to think of the circulating whispers the four walls are made up of; the moments I wish to fade into a seamless blur: the crouching back it’s held up amid a sob, the shouts heard through its grey walls–a vicious line of cursed words from fathers against sons and daughters against mothers. 

Time passes and you’ve aged as the walls have, a fade of color from paint and spirit. A chip in the foundation–pencil markings of your height throughout adolescence etched on the walls, but it's not what they remember nor do you. The irrevocable shift has been made, a rip of innocence and naivety into adulthood. You can no longer distort the memories you have sworn are not of distress–the hole in the wall isn’t from riding your remote-controlled car in the house, not when it is in the shape of an intentionally crafted fist. 

Grief is rooted in the unfolding of realization. Somewhere between then and now, a home becomes a house–a detached idea of the place you grew up in, where you learned your most prized weaponized disposal of survival instincts and defense mechanisms, a constant flow of fight or flight, the intricacies behind the structure of your irrational riddled nervous system. 

The hopeless pursuit to find reverence and sweetness in the grief of childhood–the harsh paradox of loss in growth. In bitter defiance (and what I like to believe is a crumb of wisdom), I have found sweetness in the despairs of life. It is the only method I’ve found to live true and gentle, to bring upon showers and fruit in barren land. A soft appreciation for every detail and person I encounter, yet I still have a tight-gripped fist on the collar of the girl I used to be, the act of laying her to rest feels like treachery, a betrayal within itself–the innocence I used to harbor, let go of and forgotten. The child I forced myself to be, always aware, but with a strategically laid veil of distortion to cope, a fabrication of the truth, my last best kept weapon of protection. 

I’ve laid it to rest. 

Sweetness in the bitter. 

Grace in the swarm of sorrow. 

I love the four walls of my childhood home. 

My tears have been spilled on the floor, but the walls have still held my back up for long, unrequited hours, my loyal companion–sweetness. 

I love the four walls of my childhood home. 

Home to my grandmother’s bed, the one I slept in, and it cradled me in return for a week when I lost her, a harsh flu for company as I propped myself on a mountain of pillows in my desperate attempt to reach the soul that traveled upwards to eternal inheritance. When I realized she was no longer there to whisper homemade remedies for my unrelenting colds, I made my own. I despise passing by the room, a reminder of a vacant and cold space, but sometimes I can convince myself it smells like her, a faint linger of the woman I have lost–sweetness. 

I love the four walls of my childhood home. 

Every corner of my bedroom and how it unravels a side of me, a museum of the girl I am and the people I have loved. It is the room I rotted in after the death of my mother, a memory that can strike me if I stand in a certain spot on the wood floor, but it is the room where I hold the best memories of her, a montage of laughter and her leading prayer circle on the floor with my sisters, hand in hand, where I found the tranquility of God and the privilege of being a daughter–sweetness.