Adventures in Grieving – a series

Devastation is not a long enough word to contain my emotional state when my boyfriend and I broke up a few weeks into my sophomore year in college. I hadn’t seen it coming, and it really blindsided me. I moved through fall semester with such an ache in my chest. I didn’t have enough life experience to understand that the acute pain would ease in time. What I also could not grasp until much later was how that year would come to be one of my best years of college. How could that be, you ask? I’ll tell you. It was the first experience I had with how sorrow and joy flirt and dance with each other. I sensed that joy and contentment lurked around the edges of every moment of sorrow. And vice versa. It didn’t feel like it at the time exactly, but I was getting a glimpse of it.

I was determined to not be “that girl” who lets a broken heart be the cause of performing poorly in the classroom. I had begun taking classes in my speech communication major, and that choice seemed to fit me like a glove. I excelled. I surprised myself. I flourished in ways I didn’t know were possible with a heart cracked in two.

The college community to which I belonged was tight knit. We didn’t have fraternities and sororities, but we had a house system that aimed to create a sense of belonging. There were multiple times a semester when houses hosted functions where having a date was part of the event. What I remember with gratitude and fondness is that while I wished I was attending these functions with my now ex-boyfriend, I was never left to go alone or skip an event entirely. My friends rallied around me and accompanied me to whatever outing was up next.

I haven’t thought of this in ages, but it’s come to mind recently as I navigate another season of grief and loss at the same time of year as my college break up. There’s some muscle memory with losses accumulating in the autumns of my life.

What I know now that I did not as a 19-year-old is that these seasons of grief are multi-layered and even full of promise. They are the fertile ground in which new parts of oneself can be planted and emerge later. Amid the heaviness, fatigue, and worry for my daughter, I also feel a pulse of creative energy, a spark of something new. I have no idea what form it will take or what will blossom. I don’t need to know now. I have learned to trust the process.

Often in the past two years, I’ve considered shuttering this website. I don’t write here often. I keep paying the three hundred dollars web hosting fee and feel disappointed that I haven’t contributed to it more. I’ve really grappled with having anything worth sharing outside the pages of my notebook or loose-leaf papers. There is so much noise in the world. Is there anything I could write that adds value amid all the clang and clatter of the world? But as I allow the grief to wash over me, as I invite the fatigue and anger, sadness and disappointment to accompany me, I see how what I am experiencing might truly benefit others.

What keeps me reading and writing is the promise of communion between reader and writer. I experienced that miracle just this morning as I read The Lost for Words Bookshop by Stephanie Butland. While my experience isn’t exactly like Loveday’s, she put into words some tender sentiments that brought me to tears, sobs really. And since I don’t cry easily on my own, this flash flood of emotion was a welcome relief. I didn’t feel so alone in that moment. I felt seen in ways that often feel just that much out of reach. I kept reading and crying praying that I wouldn’t shut off the faucet of tears until the well had run dry.

I couldn’t manage that surge of emotion on my own. Someone else’s words made that possible. This is why I don’t follow through with the closing the shop of words that is Celery for One. My solo experiences aren’t over just because my divorce is ten years old or because my ex-husband is no longer living or now that I’m in a loving relationship again. I still have emotions to grapple with from my marriage, separation, and divorce. Work that was paused to make sure I could be present for my little girl. Work that could not be done while I co-parented her with her dad. This work resumes now that my daughter is a young adult and her dad is deceased.

I am truly a single mom now. It’s a daunting reality. Yet, I am so grateful my daughter isn’t a little girl. She is gainfully employed and assuming the cruel realities of adulthood better than most adults I know. I’m going to see what I learn as I embark on this latest round of grief.

When some of the shock my single living had worn off, I began seeing my new reality as an adventure. It was a reframing that helped take away some of the fear or at least right sized it. I’m up for another adventure. When I think of life’s hard knocks in these terms, life gets much more interesting and inevitably easier to bear.

If you know someone who is grieving or grappling with an unexpected lane change in life, would you consider sharing this site with them? I’m interested in growing a community of people who can find each other in the depths of despair and offer some hope–even when it doesn’t seem possible in the moment.