Riding The Waves

I am not sure I will ever understand the grief process. Why some days are so very much harder than others. Why some days tears flow at the drop of a hat. Why some things just trigger you.  

There are days, days like Friday for example, that hit you like a ton of bricks. Fridays when you get off work, and the anticipation of the weekend meets with reality. Fridays aren't Fridays like they used to be anymore. There is a gift in these waves of tears. You just have to sort through them and extract the grace.  But to sort through them you have to experience them. To experience them you have to feel them. To feel them is to cry the tears, feel the hurt, the loss, the regret, the loneliness. To own exactly where you are in life. Owning it is truly the first step.

I'd like to think it gets easier, and while the frequency of the waves lessen, the intensity often doesn't. It's a wrestling match of how we expected life to go versus how life actually went. Acceptance is rugged, acceptance is grueling. Parts of life are so hard, and hard is the understatement of the century.

So here is where my instinct is to spin the positive. Partly because I want to skip past the hard parts to look for the good in all of this. It's there, I know it. I'd rather cut to the chase. But for this moment I let the tears leak out. I roll with the waves and trust they will deposit me in a softer place. A place that offers a gentle hand and a profound love. I don't have to know why things are being triggered. I don't have to understand the correlation. I just have to go through it to get to the other side. It takes faith to move through the pain. It takes trust in the process which is somewhat erratic and definitely relentless. The process takes me whether I want it to or not. I can fight it or I can lean in towards accepting it. Leaning in takes less energy, but definitely more faith.

This is grief, this is growth. This is my reality, tears and all.