Love & Loss
7/10/2022
Warning - Explicit Language Usage (1 time)“Hold up, wait a minute, all good just a week ago”
Childish Gambino’s 3005 from his album, Because the Internet, hits you with those lyrics as he begins to paint the picture of the complex dynamics in his relationship, yet I’m sitting here thinking about how this feels incredibly true to my grief experience. If only I was just complaining about relationship problems.
Honestly, before Malcolm died, I saw myself as a grief warrior, using love as my greatest superpower. (eyeroll) My maternal grandmother & great-grandmother died in back to back years, with the unexpected death of a highschool classmate in between. Along with this grief, came the realization that I would never have the relationship I had hoped to have with my birth mother. It was like I was hit with a dumpster truck full of loss and because (by divine timing) I turned 21 shortly after this series, drinking became quite the prominent coping mechanism.
**Cue random rage cries & confusing drunk nights with my high school/college boyfriend, drinking alcohol until I was taken advantage of by sexually driven college guys, and the constant reconfiguration of how I was actually going to go on living in this world.
At the time, I *thankfully* reached a point where I acknowledged that (excuse my french) things were fucked up. It only took about 9 months of really unstable personal regulation and lack of actually talking with my friends about it before I realized that I needed some counseling support. Turns out that there are better and worse ways to use love as a superpower.
Here I am almost 10 years later and it seems like the Universe, Source, God/Goddess, or whatever you think is happening in the “great beyond”, loves to hit hard with the loss experiences. However, this time I have a far deeper energetic & spiritual practice to replace my young, unhealthy coping skills. I have a solid support system, was given an abundance of grief resources, and actually cared about how I moved through this experience. This must be a reminder of what it means to be a “life-long learner”.
After I had given birth to Malcolm & we were sitting in the hospital, my mind kept trying to make sense of what just happened by reflecting back to the last week. As if something somehow changed in the last week of pregnancy that I could have known without knowing. Telling myself that there was some way that I could have changed this outcome.
(For whoever needs this, there is not any action that guaranteed a different outcome.)I was bargaining and I was in shock. “Hold up, wait a minute, all good just a week ago”
My love and gratitude for this baby was so intense. I worked so hard to heal my own heart & release trauma before this pregnancy. I worked so hard to find love in loveless spaces during the pregnancy. I put so much effort into optimizing not only the pregnancy experience, but also the long-term outcomes of our baby & myself.
Do you feel that? Yes, that. That energy that builds up slowly from the pre-pregnancy through to the moment of loss. Then it all dissipates.
“Hold up, wait a minute, all good just [insert time measurement here] ago”
Like a sandcastle on a beach, we worked hard. We carefully packed the sand in our preferred buckets. We shaped the tops of towers with intention. We carved our names carefully into the door. We built a strong mote around the perimeter. We even carefully decorated the tower peaks…all for the high tide to wash it away.
All of that energy just to be reminded that, indeed, everything is temporary. Especially our existence.
This hurts because we loved. This grief is heavy because our love was light. Our loss makes us face the spaces that we dedicated for all of our different kinds of love. Our loss reminds us that we had been living with plans and expectations that were not guaranteed. We existed within a filter that only let us see how everything could go right for us, when it was truly never promised.
“Hold up, wait a minute, all good just a week ago”
So this makes me consider how we exist now and how we think about moving forward. Are we going to try to build another sandcastle? Are we going to be scared of it getting washed away? Are we going to try to build our sandcastle to be the same as the first? Will we try out making different sandcastles for different purposes? How much time will we focus on our building? What if we don’t know how to be a team anymore?
Among all of the questions that run through our grieving minds filled with anxiety and fear, there are sensations of hope, joy, and love sprinkled in. We will take our time and play in the sand until it feels right to create something. At least, that’s how we feel for now.
Except this time, we know more about the tides, we know more about love, and we know more about loss.
