Grief, my old Friend
A post attempting to convey a shade of grief and faith.
I've been trying to grab hold of it and run away from it completely- grief- and it's left me feeling hollow. I can feel the shape of myself and the cavity that needs filling, but every time I pour something in, it seeps right out. I can't find the leak. I don't want to say I'm lost, because I thought I found what I'm looking for. But it might not be it. I keep wondering if the grasping of it, the thing I thought I found within me, still echoes my past striving...which I know from experience only leads to further STRIFEing.
Have I found peace, really, or am I just traumatized? Am I revisiting the familiar parts of trauma and calling it peace? In my relationships. In my motherhood. In my work.
I'm exhausted trying to know. I sigh a lot. I wonder all the time. I have endless words and none at all. I wrote a poem weeks after a miscarriage that really paints the picture.
Hollow Wombman
Grief, have I not known you?
Have you not held me in the air by my neck?
Squeezing out all of my breath
Stifling my sobs
Forcing quiet cries
Have you not branded me?
So that I can never un-know that I belong to you?
That my identity can’t stand apart from you
I am now yours, Grief.
Take me out more quickly.
You’re like a slow-killing poison writhing through my veins
But if you go, will I know myself?
Will I know Life again?
Because even if you go, all that stands left in your place is Loss
Smiling wryly at me
Creeping
That was 6 years ago, and the grief that envelops me now is both a stranger and a friend. It's the longing for whatever I hoped for, and the hope that I could one day stop wanting what I hoped for. The inner pleading for the pain and disappointment to stop, and the bottomless, suffocating fear that it never will. Having to meet and embrace a new version of myself over and over, right after fighting so hard to claim the previous version. Hating that version because she was bright-eyed, courageous, and tenacious in her efforts to both hope and try, and she's gone. Disappointment drained her and still is.
This post ends unsatisfyingly because that's exactly what this season of journeying through faith is. A push and pull to please God. Wanting to and hating to try. Failing miserably, and the wax and wane between apathy and reverence.
Deep questioning and worry that I'm getting it wrong again. Life. The trying of life. The working, the waiting, the trying to push toward happiness, to move a season forward toward something akin to joy. Feeling both responsible for and at the mercy of whatever makes for healing.
Grief. Silence. Aloneness. The void.
God says He's in this with me, even here (Hebrews 13:5). I can't feel Him.