… is unparalleled.

Happy Father’s Day, you.

*****

(And for my dad, best of men, always loved, always missed, this.)

This – the post below – is something that I wrote a few years ago, when I was still in the first joyous and anxious flush of new motherhood. It’s one of my very favourite posts, although one that has gotten buried in the sands of Wordpress, and time. It’s also a post that I’ve been thinking about a lot, not least because of my sister’s ongoing struggle with the prospect of saying goodbye to her son (a struggle that extends to all of us), but also because of my father’s passing, and my keen awareness, in the long process of letting him go, of how difficult he found it to let me and my sister (and, in a completely different context, my mother) go, of how difficult he found it to let anything go. And then, last night, I saw a film (about which I will write more at length, once I can do so without crying) that touched all these nerves, and more, and reminded me that what I thought was a unique experience of motherhood is, in fact, an experience of parenthood, one that fathers share no less for being fathers. And that, perhaps, it is an experience of love generally – of the necessity of giving love air to breathe, of the inextricability of loss from love, of the impossibility of holding on to those we love too tightly – of the undesirability of holding on too tightly – of the inevitability of goodbye. So I am revisiting it here. I am not sure, yet, what I have learned from revisiting it. Other than, maybe, that I need to meditate more upon the cruelty and beauty and necessity of letting go.

*****

One of the most difficult things about pregnancy, for me, was that it forced me to confront myself as a biological creature. It forced me to experience myself as a body, as a being put entirely into the service of nature. My every wakeful – and not so wakeful – moment was spent in a state of hyper-consciousness about my physicality: I was nurturing a life, and that life depended upon my physical being, and no force of intellect or imagination could alter or facilitate or intercede in that dependency. And as a person who had spent all of her conscious years in her head – and someone who was well-trained in a school of philosophical thought that emphasizes the absolute primacy of mind over body, reason over appetite and base sense – this was very, very hard for me.

So I was anxious – anxious beyond measure – about birth and new motherhood, which I perceived as a broadening and deepening of this experience. I didn’t fear it, exactly: I wanted the experience. Every fibre of my physical being strained toward this experience, and demanded that my mind follow – this, in itself, was disconcerting. The thing of it was, rather, that I doubted my ability to stay the course: how would I ever, ever find my way through this dense thicket, this overwhelming jungle, without maps, without books, without the compass of my intellect? How would I survive, if I had only the thrum of my senses to guide me?

I learned, of course. This education came with difficulty: I spent weeks, months, trying to beat back heavy, fear-dampened branches with dog-eared tomes of advice on navigating the brave new world of motherhood (tomes written, no less, by only the most theoretical of explorers, explorers – men – who had only scanned this landscape through spyglasses, safe on their ships, far from these strange shores), only to discover that while these might force the branches back for a moment, it would only be for a moment, before the branches would lash back and knock me off my feet.

I put the books away. I put the books away and set about listening to the thrum of my senses, and discovered, slowly, that doing what felt right kept me on the clearest course. I navigated my way (with no small assistance from others lost in the same wood, shouting encouragement and direction) through breastfeeding and swaddling and sleep and sleep and sleep and crying-it-out and the first signs of spiritedness, guided by my senses and by the gentle prodding of the sympathetic hands of fellow travelers. I found my way. And now, even when I lose my way, which I still do, I know to trust myself and the kindness of fellows in finding my way back. I know what to do.

The knowledge came, however, in more than the form of a sense of direction. I came to know the the unparalleled joy of allowing myself to embrace my biology, my physicality – and the unparalleled bliss that comes with bonding oneself with, binding oneself to, another creature, and having that creature be bound to you, so tightly, so deeply, that you are really are as one, one physical being, with one bonded heart and one bonded soul. We know something of this bond in love, in erotic love, but only ever fleetingly, in the sweet interstices of romantic companionship; we are never fully, physically bound to our other, no matter what we think Plato might have said, through Socrates, about our souls’ other halves – we are complete souls, we adult beings, and although our greatest happinesses come with allowing our souls to join hands with others, we never merge souls, not really.

Except, that is, when we have a baby. Then we know – if only for a moment, for one long, sweet moment – what it is to be more than one, to be one plus, to have split open and spilled out our blood and our viscera and our spirit and gathered it all back up again in our arms and held it, tight, pressed it to our chests, felt it throbbing and squirming and to have known, to know, what it is to hold one’s soul in one’s arms.

And then to have it pulled away. Because this is what is inevitable, this is what the books can’t tell you, this what no mother can escape: from the moment your child, your soul, is handed to you, whether that child has been pulled from your gut or yanked out from between your legs or flown from across the sea, whether your soul comes to you in gore or wrapped in white cotton sheets, your possession of it – of him, of her – is temporary. Mind-spinningly temporary. Every second, every heartbeat, that passes from the moment you clutch your second soul, your little soul, in your arms, takes that soul away from you. Every moment is a moment of growth, and every moment of growth loosens your grip. And you must keep holding, you must keep your arms outstretched, but you can’t, you mustn’t, fight to hold on.

This, then, is the art of motherhood, and it is not an art of the mind: to hold on and let go, at the same time.

We are constantly letting go: when they are pulled from our arms for the first time, when they stretch out their arms to someone else for the first time, when they first say no. When they first push themselves out of our arms, when they crawl, when they walk, little feet carrying them away. When they wean. When they wave bye-bye without shedding a tear. When they fall down and they hurt and turn to someone else for comfort. When they grow, when they live – with every step that they take they are moving away from us. And it is our task to navigate this ongoing, this infinite, this inevitable, this necessary separation with love and with grace.

But once you have learned to know with your body – to have reached far, far beyond carnal knowledge and the intoxicating wisdom of the flesh – to know, fully, what it is to be a body with a soul threaded, literally and figuratively, to its heart, a soul that can give birth to itself, take form, be held oh so tightly and then let go – once you have this knowledge, you are, truly, naked, vulnerable, exposed, open to untold hurts, to infinite pains, to the unshakeable awareness of loss. This is knowledge, and this knowledge thrills, and stings.

So it is that we mothers are ever walking out of the Garden, cursing and praising the heavens, grasping at roses, pricking our heels on thorns.

So it is that we all of us are ever walking out of the Garden, cursing and praising the heavens, grasping at roses, pricking our heels on thorns.

There’s a home for the elderly that Emilia and Jasper and I pass every day on our walks to and from preschool and junior kindergarten and ballet lessons and karate. Emilia calls the ladies who live there her ladies – “we need to wave to my ladies, Mommy!” -  and she waves and blows kisses to them when we see them sitting in their enclosed verandah, and, when they come out outside for their daily constitutionals, she stops for chats and hugs. They give her extra candy at Halloween. She thinks that they’re awesome. “Just like Grandma, only not so far away and also they give me candy instead of cake.” Which is an important difference, you know.

The other day, after passing her ladies and dispensing the requisite waves and kisses, Emilia asked this: “why are some grandmas in wheelchairs?”

“Because they’re older, sweetie, and their bodies aren’t working so well anymore, and they can’t walk as much as they used to, so they need help. Wheelchairs help them get around.”

“Are they going to die? Because their bodies aren’t working?”

“Not just yet, I don’t think. But yes, when people get much older, they’re closer to dying.”

“And when their bodies aren’t working they’re closer to dying too?”

This is what you get when death is a semi-regular topic in your household. “Yes, sweetie, when their bodies aren’t working.”

“Is Tanner going to die?”

Ah. Ugh.

“Because he’s in a wheelchair, and his body isn’t working. Is he going to die, Mommy?”

It’s moments like these that one wishes, fervently, that a meteor would blast out of the sky or a unicorn would leap out from behind a tree or that a team of nude marathoners would streak by on the street because, seriously, flapping genitals and shooting stars and beasts of myth and legend would be easier to account for than the fact that one’s child’s much-loved cousin is dying.

To say that I chose my words carefully is dramatic understatement. “He is dying, honey. Not right now, though.”

“When?”

“We don’t know.” I clutched her hand and prayed for unicorns. “We don’t know.”

“Well, when he dies I need him to take a letter to Grandpa. I’ll write one for him, too, but there’s one I need to send to Grandpa and you said that he doesn’t have a mailbox so someone needs to take it to him. Can we phone Tanner and ask him if he’ll do that?”

No unicorns appeared, no meteors blazed through the sky, no nudists ran past us in the street, and when she asked if I was crying, I said no, no, there’s just something in my eye. And then I prayed even harder for unicorns.

******

I sent a letter with my dad when he died. I wrote a letter to him, and asked the funeral director to lay it upon his body when he was cremated. I said secret things, loving things; I gave thanks; I made promises. And I asked him if he wouldn’t mind delivering another letter, a letter to my Grandma, a letter that I had written many, many years before, when she died, and that I had asked him to give to her, a letter that I found, after he died, in one of his secret boxes of letters, a letter that he had kept alongside his suicide notes, a letter that, I think, reminded him of how powerful love and how powerful life and how powerful death and that kept him from fulfilling the his suicide wishes and that kept him tethered to life, and the joy of life, whenever such joy was faint. I asked the funeral director to place that letter upon his body, too, so that he might deliver it to her, because I knew that he’d always intended to, and that he’d be glad.

And so those letters burned with my father’s body, and that they did provided me – still provides me – with some comfort. And him too, I think. I hope.

So. I understand why Emilia wants to write him a letter. I know why she wants Tanner to deliver it. My heart weeps, knowing this.

******

We don’t really talk to Tanner about death, or at least, not about the fact that he’s dying. When my father died, we stumbled around the subject, struggling to frame it in the most positive terms – Grandpa had a good life, Grandpa was so loved, Grandpa will always be with us in our hearts – and to balance the sadness with joy – it’s okay to be sad, because we miss him, but we’re sad because we still love him and will always love him and love never dies and that’s good. That’s good! We threw a birthday party – at the lake, on the beach – for him, in lieu of a memorial, so that there could be balloons and cake and candles, so that the kids, and Tanner especially, would experience the occasion as joyous rather sad, a celebration rather than a goodbye. We called it his last birthday, and Emilia and Jasper and Sophie and Tanner loved it, and even though the wheels of Tanner’s chair got stuck in the sand and seagulls stole some of his cake, he declared it a good day. “This was a good day,” he said, and we all agreed. We saved our tears for later.

My mom and discussed at length whether we were wrong to try to contain some of our sadness about Dad’s death in front of Tanner. Wouldn’t we do better, I wondered, to be honest? To let him know that it’s okay to hurt, to be sad about death? So that he knows, when the time comes, that we’ll be hurt and sad for him? My mom disagreed. He knows we’re sad. But he doesn’t need see us in the full bloom of pain.

We still don’t know how to navigate this, this narrow valley between the joy of life and the fear of death, this valley that gets narrower and narrower the further we walk. How do we openly exult in the sunlight without acknowledging the shadows? How do we make plain how precious is each day without acknowledging that we are counting those days? How does one talk about death with a child who is dying? How does one talk about a child dying to the children that love him?

How does one prepare them for the letters?

Emilia cannot make her phone call, of course. We are not making preparations for Tanner’s death, except for all of the ways that we are, all of the ways that we prefer to think of as life, as living, as seizing the days, and so now is not the time. I don’t know that there will be ever be such a time, although perhaps there should be, perhaps there needs to be, and perhaps this angst is just my soul recoiling against what this all means.

I will let her write her letters, and I will save them for her, and when the time is right, maybe – sometime, when we are all holding hands and walking through the narrowing valley – she will ask Tanner to take them and he and she and we will be comforted. Maybe. Maybe.

Emilia wants to know what happens when we die. She asks a few times a week, on average, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on whether or not we’ve spoken about my dad or about Tanner or about dinosaurs. Today, she asked because they’d been talking about the Easter story at school. She wanted to know why Jesus got to fly up into the sky, and Grandpa didn’t.

You burned him, didn’t you? she asks. How could he fly after that?

Explaining death is one thing. Explaining the cremation, the afterlife and Divine resurrection are something else entirely.

We’ve had a lot of these talks. We’ve been having them since my dad died, since she watched me collapse and shatter into a million tiny pieces and wanted to know why. They’ve been good talks, but I fear that they’ve been better for me than they have for her: she has grounded me with her questions, and given me solace with her answers. Because she has her own answers, she pulls them from the sky or the stars or the spirits or her soul and she lays them bare and shares them with me, her stories, the stories that she weaves to make sense of all this mysterious loss, this loss that I can’t explain, lapsed, struggling Catholic that I am, groping for a faith that eludes.

This is why I am failing at this: I have no answers for her. I have no answers, only wishes, only hopes, only deeply held hopes that I ache to grasp with certainty, but which remain – for me, who is grasping at that lost faith, that faith that once upon a time held answers – ephemeral, evanescent, faint. So when she asks me, where did Grandpa go, I say, I think that he went to a place called Heaven, a wonderful place full of love and light where we will someday see him again, and I cry as I say it, because I don’t know for sure, and I wish with every particle of my soul that I did know, that I could know, because I would give anything to know, anything. And she says, in the softest of voices, I know where he is. He’s in his Death House, the one that I made him, and someday we will go there.

– Oh, sweetie…

I know that you think he’s in that box, but he’s not, he’s in his house in Heaven, and we’ll go there someday, and you’ll see, and you’ll know.

And my heart expands, and breaks.

******

My friend Kate, who has known terrible loss, wrote the other day about thumb-wrestling with Death as she prepares for the death of her grandmother. She didn’t like doing it, she said, not least because he has longer thumbs, which I imagine is true. She asked her readers to not leave condolences, but, instead, memories, of their mothers, whose flour-dusted hands wiped tears and whose lipsticked mouths left kiss-marks and whose warm arms were the safest place in either earth or Heaven, so that we might reflect upon motherhood persisting against and beyond death, and I said this:

I have nightmares, about losing my mom, about losing my mom after losing my dad and being left, alone, without them, an orphan, my longest and most deeply held fear. I have nightmares, about fighting with Death, about begging him to stay away.

I’m sorry. I wanted to say something lovely, about my mom’s belly laugh and her twinkling eyes and her perverse imagination, the one that conjures alligators in closets for my daughter to hunt and her ability to bake a lemon cake, right on the spot, just because you asked. But I’ve been having nightmares.

I have been having nightmares, nightmares wherein my dad is already gone and then my mom goes too and I am left to suffer the pain of my greatest fear, the fear that drove me to sleep on their bedroom floor at night, the fear that kept me from sleepover parties and sleep-away camp, the fear of losing them, of being left alone, an orphan. When I was child, my good Catholic parents would comfort me and soothe me and brush my hair from my tear-dampened cheeks and tell me that they would never leave me and I clung to that, even as I knew it to be false, I clung to it, and when I flew west to deal with my father’s death some months ago (an eternity ago, a second ago) I sat in my seat on the plane and cried and cried and cried like the little girl that I had suddenly become again, having flashed backwards in time to that experience of knowing that it would happen and that it would hurt, bad, worse than anything else I could imagine, and then flashed forward again to discover that yes, yes, this is exactly how it feels, and it is terrible, horrible and bad.

And so now I am terrified of having the loss compounded. And I am terrified of communicating – directly or indirectly, intentionally or not – this terror to Emilia, who is too astute, who knows too well when I am sad or afraid and who knows the difference between my sadness and my fear and wants to understand them. But I don’t want her to understand them, I don’t want her to think about losing me, because I want to forestall this pain for her, even as I shudder at its inevitability.

I have nightmares. And my only solace – my lifesaver, my heartsaver, the backbone of my soul armor – is, really, my daughter and her kindergarten theology, her insistence that it will all be okay, that we will all end up at happy place, that she knows this, because we must, because it is true.

I hold her to me tightly, and weep for this, in gratitude and shame.

Are there horses in Heaven? — I don’t know; what do you think? — Did Grandpa love horses? — He did. — Then there are horses there. Someday, I will ride them.

– Me too, sweetie. Me too.

******

This post was inspired by a discussion that was shared between me and some very good friends – Lindsay, Loralee, Julie and Devra – at Mom 2.0. We curled up on the floor of the bedroom of the Four Season’s Presidential Suite during the CheeseBurgHer party and talked spirituality and faith, grief and loss, prayer and meditation and all variety of confused and confusing things. And then Lindsay decided that maybe we should explore some these questions (like the one I’m struggling with above, talking to kids about death) together, on our blogs. So we are. You’re welcome to join in. Leave me a link if you do. Or just speak your piece in the comments. Talking, maybe, will bring enlightenment. Or maybe more confusion. Either/or.

So: how do you talk to your children about death? Do you talk to your children about death? If they ask the hard questions, how do you/will you answer? Or do you, will you, like me, seek their answers, and look for comfort there?

PS: I offer another, somewhat less morose reflection on navigating the waters of loss with children over at Their Bad Mother. Because once I start talking, I can’t stop.

I don’t quite know what to say about Joannie Rochette. I’ve been stunned by her bravery, humbled by her strength, amazed by her determination in the face such terrible sadness. When my father died, it was days before I could even walk in a straight line, weeks before I could hold myself reliably upright. After losing her mother, Joannie Rochette strapped on her skates and competed for an Olympic medal. Incredible. Courageous.

It’s courageous because it represents an overcoming of a terrible grief, a grief that comes at you like a baton to the knees and the gut and the mind and the heart. It’s not a defeat of such grief – there is no defeat of such grief – but it is – it represents – a willingness and an ability to power through that grief and to keep moving, keep persevering, keep living, in spite of that grief. And more than that, perhaps: to take that grief and let it move through you in a way that carries you forward, to feel its battering force and take that force and bend it to your will and make it dance, to dance with it, to take the lead and turn the struggle into something beautiful.

I would like to do that. But I still feel, more often than not, that the grief is moving me, leading me, directing our steps. We’re dancing, I know, and it’s not always terrible (that is one grief’s secrets: that it is sometimes welcomed, that it is sometimes embraced, because the grieving soul does, sometimes, just want to give in, to fall back into the deep curve of those arms and yield to the bending and the tipping and to just let its fingers graze the floor as it sways and drops) but it is not controlled, I am not controlling it, I am just being led, and I wish, sometimes, that I were not.

Jeannie Rochette will have her moments, I know; moments in which she will no longer feel in control, when she will not be able to stand, let alone skate, because this kind of pain – no matter what anyone says – is terrible, terrible, beyond measure. But she will always have this moment of triumph, this overcoming, this demonstration of the force of life and love in the face of death. For that she should be proud. To that we should all aspire.

I do.

Alexander McQueen died this week. He committed suicide, and he did so, in part, it seems, because of his bereavement over the death of his mother earlier this month.

This is going to sound awful, terrible, extreme, insane… but… I think that I know – maybe, a little bit – how he felt.

I didn’t contemplate suicide when my dad died, but I did contemplate death, closely and more personally than I had ever contemplated it before. As I flew home to deal with his death – as I struggled with finding myself, suddenly, living the nightmare that had haunted my childhood (because this is the horror of losing a parent: you become a child again, and that child’s worst fear comes true, and her source of comfort is gone and she becomes lost and it is the stuff of nightmares and it is bad) – I thought, more than once, I could die now. This plane could plummet to the ground and I could die and it would not be a terrible thing, because at least then I would know, I would go to where he had gone and I would know.

I was aware that this thought was disturbed, that it was wrong, that I did not want to die, but in those moments – and, truthfully, in some moments since – I thought – I have thought – of death differently; I have thought of it more intimately; it has something to do with me, now, and I cannot turn away from it, and if it ever came too close… I don’t know that I would run so fast to escape it.

I’m not suicidal. I can’t stress that enough. My life has been challenging of late, but I still love that life. It is possible to be sad, to be overcome by grief, and to still appreciate joy. I still appreciate joy. My life is filled with joy. But contemplation of death, in light of death, is not necessarily a rejection of life – sometimes, it’s just a yearning for what has been lost, an aching temptation to push aside the curtain to see what’s on the other side, so that one can know, one can see for one’s self, that it’s all okay over there, that it’s good, that it’s somewhere we might want to be. Because how else can we tolerate the loss, without clinging to a belief – no matter how tenuous – that what – who – we have lost has not disappeared but gone somewhere good, somewhere better, somewhere we might go, too. Will go, someday.

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size…

I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –

– Emily Dickinson, I measure every Grief I meet.

It does hurt to live, sometimes, when you’ve lost someone you love, someone you needed, someone who was a permanent fixture in your life, someone who you’ve never lived without, someone who was ever-present, eternal, always. It hurts to live because your life becomes suddenly different; the landscape changes so that you no longer quite recognize it; you move forward, disoriented, motion-sick. It doesn’t mean that you give up on life. It does mean that you live in a different relationship with life.

This is complicated for me, because I was convinced, for some time after my father died, that he had committed suicide. When I got the phone call, when I got the news, when I collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath, clutching at my shattered heart, this was my thought: why, Daddy, why? He had come close to suicide many times in the past, but he had promised me that he wouldn’t do it, that he couldn’t bear to hurt us that deeply, and although I believed him, when I got the news of his death, I was convinced: he’d decided that he couldn’t go on, he was in too much pain, it hurt too much to live. And so I spent many hours, many days, trying to reconcile my heart to this, to his pain, to his choice, and I got to a place where I thought that I could understand his choice, and his death having been a choice, something that he wanted, became something that was a source of some comfort.

It was determined, some months later, that he hadn’t taken his own life, but by that point I had come to that conclusion on my own, simply by sorting through the mess of his death and the disorder of his life and by asking painful questions of the people who had found him (had he fallen? where? how? did it seem sudden? oh, my heart) and, of course, by the undiscovery of a note. He would have surely written a note. He had, in fact, written such a note, which I found among his things, but it was from years ago, from a time when I hadn’t even known he was depressed, from a time before he made promises like, I won’t take my own life, sweetheart.

It hurt him to live, but live he did, until he didn’t, and in the aftermath of realizing that he had not taken his own life I was left to figure out how I felt about the fact that his death had not been his choice, that he might not have wanted it, that he might have, in his last moments, been anxious and afraid and worried that I would think that he had taken his own life. It felt bad. Ironic, that. Painful, that.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Beyond this, anyway: that when I read that Alexander McQueen had taken his own life, and that he had been grievously bereaved, gutted over the death of his mother, I thought, oh, I know, and I thought, people will say that this is strange and twisted and extreme and maybe it is those things but maybe, also, it’s not. From where I’m standing, it’s not. It’s just where someone might land when it hurts to live. It’s terrible that it ends, in his case, in another death; terrible, terrible. But such terribleness is not necessarily madness.

It’s just grief. The worst grief. Rest in peace, sad boy.

(Closing comments, again, again. I’m so sorry, I keep doing this – it’s not that I don’t love our discussions – it’s just that, I’m still sick, and this is too heavy.)

I’m trying to figure out how to write my ghost story. It’s my solace, it’s what I cling to, it’s the closest thing that I have to proof – proof! as if there could be such a thing – that the love and the light that was my father did not just snuff out, did not just disappear absolutely, when he died. So I want to write it. I promised myself that I would, when I got the courage. And you all have given me the courage, with your stories and your reflections and your all-around awesome.

But I’m tired, and writing the story is hard – each tap of my fingers on the keyboard is a tap on my heart and although I tap gently, still, the tapping wears and the words exhaust me  – and I just want to think about snowflakes and ice castles and ice dancers and all things light and sparkly and melty. And then have cocoa. Spiked with espresso.

Today, I might do just that.

I think that I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief. It’s not that I deny the fact that my father is dead – his ashes sit in a box on my mantle, surrounded, at the moment, by a few Christmas ornaments and my kids’ picture with Santa and Emilia’s bardo-drawing – it’s that I can’t wrap my head around the fact – is it a fact? – that his death is the end, that his life is over, that I’ll never see or speak with him again. The absoluteness of it all, the finality: I’m having trouble accepting this. I can’t accept this. My heart aches from its stubborn refusal to accept this.

And so I flail about, telling myself stories about ghosts and angels and the afterlife. I struggle to grasp onto my old modes of faith, to the articles of certainty – that there is a heaven, that there are angels, that after death the soul takes flight to a world that is – invisible? eternal? – and thereupon arriving is assured of bliss – that carried me through the deaths of grandparents, acquaintances, beloved pets. I read The Shack while I was at my mom’s last week and found myself unmoved, unconvinced: why should I put in stock in some stranger’s account of his weekend with the Holy Trinity, of the reassurances he received from God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit that his dead daughter was fine, just fine,  more than fine, happy, blessed, romping through eternity with Jesus at her side! Why should I be, how could I be, comforted by this when I had no such assurances about my father? What did the experience of the narrator have to do with me? If God invited me to a cottage for the weekend and fed me good food and showed me my Dad communing with Jesus in fields of wildflowers, then sure I’d feel better. Wouldn’t we all? It would be so easy, then.

The point of faith is that we don’t have such assurances. The point of faith is that we believe without such assurances. I know this. I know this.

But I don’t know where my faith is. I want so desperately to find it. I want so desperately to believe, to know, that death is not the end, that it’s not final, that it – my relationship with my father – is not over. We weren’t finished. I didn’t get to say goodbye. There were more conversations to have, more hugs to exchange, more love to express. We weren’t done. He can’t be just gone. He can’t be. He can’t be.

I find myself, too many nights, too many days, reeling from the shock of the realization that he is gone, doubling over, falling to my knees, pressing my fists to my eyes to push back the tears. And invariably, as I reel and fall and struggle, I find myself telling myself that it – this, all this – just isn’t. It just isn’t. It’s not the end. It can’t be. And so I return to the old stories, the articles of faith that used to provide comfort, that could provide comfort still, if I could hold onto them the way that I used to. I tell myself that he must be somewhere. But where? Someone said to me, some months ago, that he’d gone to a better place, and I wanted to grab them by the collar and shake them and make them tell me, where? Where? How do you know? Do you know? Tell me!

I knew that they didn’t know. I was angry that they didn’t know. I am angry that I don’t know. I want so badly to know.

I read an exchange the other day between Jean Vanier and a Canadian writer, about death. Vanier wrote about how he felt when a beloved friend died, how he waited to hear from her, how he waited for some ghostly visit or dream message. “I had hoped that (she) might find a way of communicating with me,” he said. She didn’t. “All I can do,” he concluded, “is trust that she is well.” I too had hoped that my dad might find some way of communicating with me. I tell myself that he might have (I have stories; I am not ready to share them); I look for his messages everywhere, I look so closely that I worry I will miss them for looking. I look so closely, because I don’t quite – I don’t yet? – have the faith that would allow me to just trust.

I don’t know what such faith would look like, exactly. I look to the Bible, I look to the poets. I look to Socrates, who insisted that death should never be feared or mourned, because the soul’s release from the body is a liberation for which it -  if it loves wisdom, if it yearns for the goods that the body and the material world, the cave, cannot provide – strives. Socrates would tell me that I shouldn’t be looking for faith, I should be looking for understanding. But my head is muddled because I am distracted by my heart, my aching heart, and at the moment I can see no more light in wisdom than I can in my Children’s Illustrated Bible and my dog-eared copy of The Little Prince.

I think, part of the problem is, I do believe; there’s a way of looking at what I’ve called my denial and seeing it as faith, as a fervent attachment to the belief that this – life, physical existence, the here-and-now – is not it, that this cannot be it, that death is not an eternal nothing, consignment to dust and nothing more. But the skeptic in me tells me that that – that attachment to belief – is just magical thinking, wishful thinking, and for the life of me I can’t tease these apart or bring them together, my insistence upon rational explanation and my desire to be comforted by faith.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. I hate not knowing.

I’ve decided that the only way to confront this is to really, meaningfully explore faith. I’ve explored – I continue to explore – reason; I spent the better part of my adult life plugging away at the study of philosophy, battering back faith with books. Now I want to let down my guard and see if I can find faith again – it doesn’t matter where – and, if I can find it, see if we have anything in common. Part of this undertaking is banal, and biasedly so: I simply want to find some reassurance about death. I want – I actively want, even though I know that I might not find this, that it might not be possible to find this, that my comfort will derive from something other than this – to be reassured that, as Jean Vanier quotes Rabindranath Tagore, ‘death is not the lamp that goes out, but the coming of dawn.’ This desire is so ordinary, so expected, so given. But sometimes the greatest journeys begin as excursions toward and through the ordinary, as expeditions in search of received truths. Maybe. I don’t know.

I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I’m kind of giving in to the flailing. This will serve me ill, or well. We’ll see.

*deepbreath*

Do you believe in life after death? In anything after death? In some movement of the soul beyond the body, some extension of the spirit beyond the material? And whatever you believe, do you believe it fervently? Or cautiously? Or with with many heavy grains of salt or whatever seasoning it is that tempers flights of fancy, if that is indeed what these are? It’s okay if you don’t believe; I’m interested to hear it. But I also really want to hear if you do. I need to hear if you do. I’ve been afraid to ask. But I want to know.

*apologies to Rilke.

I wanted this year to start with laughter and smiles and cookies and fizzy soda. I didn’t want confetti and champagne and fireworks and streamers – I just wanted smiling. I just wanted this year to start happy.

I’m still trying to find the happy. Yes, my heart lifts when I hug my children and my lips curve when they giggle but the last week of last year and the first week of this year have been covered in a thick blanket of fever and snot and heartache and it’s been hard to find the laughter. And although Nyquil takes the edge off the fever and snot, there aren’t sufficient meds for heartache, Ativan and Xanax notwithstanding. Last week was much, much harder than I thought it would be – doing the final clean-up of my dad’s place in the week between Christmas and New Year’s was, in hindsight, less than ideal timing. Coping with the heart-punches of the holidays was difficult enough without throwing myself into the line of fire of the gut-kicks and soul-wedgies that came with seeing the last of his things carted away, his home wiped clean of his presence.

I feel like I’m grieving anew. And I feel like I’m grieving out of pace with how I should, out of pace with what is expected. Which shouldn’t matter, but it does, because I have to account for myself, I have work to do, I have responsibilities, and there’s a limit to how much space I can carve out for these depressions before the voices – mine, others – say, isn’t that enough? Get on with your life.

There’s a limit to how much I can say about all this – how much dark poetry I can attempt to wring from all this – before it gets old and tiresome and done. I know that grief doesn’t follow a schedule, but I also know that one shouldn’t dwell in grief indefinitely. There’s time for grief, and there’s time for letting go of grief, and I simply don’t know the measure between these.

Maybe it’s just the fever. Maybe I’ll feel better once the fog lifts and I feel strong again.

Or maybe Emilia just needs to keep adding to her Blair SnowWitch Project in the backyard until I get spooked out of my malaise. That could work, too.

The question was: what story are you telling yourself right now? (And, can you give yourself permission to change the ending?)

The answer was: this year, this decade, is ending in sadness. This year, this decade, is ending and my heart is wrapped in grief.

But: I can give myself permission to change the ending. I just need to figure out how.

A start: reflecting on the things that have made me happy this year. To wit: traveling across the country with my children and with dear friends; having a few lovely, brilliant days with my father before he died; my husband, who is my joy and my rock; my children, my children, my children, my children; overcoming fear; overcoming greater fear; facing fear and calling it to account and demanding that it reveal itself as something more, something better, something beautiful.

This is the ending that I want for my year, an ending that celebrates all the joy that circumnavigated the grief, and ending that finds the bravery in the fear and the beauty in the darkness and the wonder and greatness and living and loving that was in everything.

And I want this ending to be a beginning, an opening-up, an opening-towards new fear and new beauty and new wonder and new confusion and new dark and new light – because all of these need each other, each of these requires the others – and all of this as it folds back into the old and becomes greater-than and more.

And it can be. It will.

Happy New Year.