11/09/2024
Last Friday I welcomed and am blessed celebrate the joy of my second grandchild’s birth, (waiting for the proud parents to announce!) I ponder the dichotomies in this lifetime we all will face. Guaranteed: we are all born, and we will all die. Remember the dash? The mark between your birth year and year of death on your cemetery marker? That’s the juicy juice of life. What falls in between. Not the words you said or wrote, the accolades and awards you accumulated or the mistakes you tally. Not the degrees you earned, the hours you worked, or value of your bank account. The mark represents the way you made the people in your life feel.
“If anyone could make it out, it will be Tim,” one person stated assuredly. I knew the dark smoke took him from the 105th floor, and my unborn baby and I felt his transition as I collapsed, dry heaving on the bathroom floor, before Tower One imploded.
About 10pm, I gathered our five children on our bed. I decided they would not attend school the following day, as our house was brimming with family and close friends, feigned optimism each passing hour, waiting for Tim’s return home, preparing to search shelters and hospitals the following morning. I prayed the rosary out loud, soothing their frantic excitement. The rhythmic breathing assured me they finally found sleep, and enveloped in a celestial glow, a warm presence of God, I heard Tim tell me he was safe, that I was not to ponder his suffering, and that our kids, the 11-week baby in my belly (he intuitively kissed goodbye on his way out before 5:30 that morning) and I would be okay. I treasure that heavenly moment today.
A few nights later, our home still overflowing with family and friends, and my bed still overstuffed with kids aged 15 months to 11 years, I overheard conversation on the deck below. Tim's brothers and best friends each made claim to being his best friend. They were all wrong, I smiled to myself, it was me. And we were all right. There is a dichotomy. No one was right, no one was wrong. We were all his best friends. Tim made us all feel special.
I spoke through the years, of Tim’s uncanny ability to make everyone feel unique: his family, friends from elementary school through college, co-workers, competitors in the markets he worked, brokers and banks he scored financial success, from the waitress at Windows of the World, to the delivery person, to the referee who put our son in the penalty box. They all reached out to me over the following months with stories about him. Really!
What if we could all know how our actions impact the lives around us before we die? Would we behave better? Or a better question… Would we behave better when we knew no one was looking? What if we had a choice not to grieve? Would I choose a different life, knowing ahead of the tragedy my kids and I would experience? NOPE!
I am rather practiced, now, with grief. I lost one of my children’s twins halfway through the pregnancy, lost another baby due to ectopic pregnancy, lost my dad to chronic disease, two very close friends, one after a short battle with vicious cancer, and another to horrifying ALS, and when my best friend’s husband passed suddenly last year, it all began to have meaning. The pain of grief does not make sense. There is never an answer to “Why?” There is never an end or a healing. Ever.
There IS EVOLUTION.
I remember in October of 2001, watching all the families milling about the local orchard, and viewing mine as broken. We took a bumpy itchy hayride, the boys were sling-shotting baby pumpkins into a field, then picking apples with enormous apple graspers on long poles that looked more like weapons than tools. Andrew, 9 years old, looked at me, beaming, and stated, “Mommy, I never thought we would have fun again,” and threw his arms around me. That minute I realized I can be enormously heart stricken with grief and enjoy the moment of NOW. My children are my best teachers. My evolution was beginning.
Christmas that year I shared my first belly laugh. The kind that made me wet my pants, roll from side to side, cheek muscles ache, and cause my children to wake, jump out of bed to come running to see what made me laugh so hard, when I had not laughed since September 10th. I even kept laughing replaying the scene with my father-in-law in my mind after I was in bed that Christmas night, and can laugh still. He made a Freudian slip, a really dirty, nasty, Freudian slip that caused us both to double over. We redoubled every time we were asked what it was that ignited our contagious howling, and we never answered the question due to inability to stop cracking up. Another step in the dichotomy of grief, being in the pain of the first holiday without Tim, and the joy of unexpected silly laughter.
What I know for sure, is the more fiercely we love, the more fiercely we grieve. We go through all the stages that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and as David Kessler added, search for meaning. It is not sequential, it is not one and done, and it is never over. It is more of an evolution, a spiral, ever widening and expanding! It still hurts, sometimes in a softer way, and sometimes like a mac truck, decades later. Yet, if I had to do it all again, I would not change a thing. I have found 100% agreement in everyone who has experienced intense profound prolonged grief. They would also fiercely love that person through their life, perhaps even more vocally, more voraciously, more like each day was the last.
I promise I have more to reveal about this Joy of Grief, stay tuned! The book proposal has been submitted, and editing is a work in progress. I am going through the recommended publication process: I built a business and my website, work with clients, and hope to create a newsletter, a Substack page, increase my social media presence and build a following… daunting to me, so thank you in advance for your feedback (positive and negative is necessary and appreciated). A day at a time!
Keep Loving!
Keep living in service to the people around you, especially when no one is looking!
Keep being a unexpected smile and act of random kindness in each day!
