3-12-21

It’s Friday night and usually the end of the week is a time to let one’s hair down, relax with friends or family, stay up a little later with a book or favorite show, put pj’s on early and stretch out in a comfy chair.

But today my heart is full of grief – grief shared by friends, grief for crazy mishaps, bad medical news, remembering lost relationships.

I’m not great at grief. I like to keep it in a very small box that is tricky to open but easy to lock up and put it on a shelf. So when that box comes off the shelf and I have gotten it open, it helps to use other people’s words to say what I am feeling.

My favorite writer to speak my grief is Jan L. Richardson and my favorite words come from her book, A Cure For Sorrow. So here are the words I want to say to those I care about and the words I want to hear tonight:

Because I do not know
any medicine for grief
but to let ourselves
grieve.

Because I do not know
any cure for sorrow
but to let ourselves
sorrow.

Because I do not know
any remedy
but to let the heart break,
to let it fall open, then
to let it fall open
still more.

Because I do not know
how to mend
the unmendable,
unfixable,
unhealable wound
that keeps finding
itself healed
as we tend it,
as we follow the
the line of it,
as we let it lead us
on the path
it knows.

Because I do not know
any solace
but to give ourselves
into the love
that will never cease
to find us,
that will never loose
its hold on us,
that will never abandon us
to the sorrow
for which it holds
the cure.