Blessing for the Dailiness of Grief

 Sorry I am to say it, but it is here, most likely, you will know the rending most deeply.

It will take your breath away, how the grieving waits for you in the most ordinary moments.

It will wake with your waking.
It will sit itself down with you at the table, inhabiting the precise shape of the emptiness across from you.

It will walk down the street with you in the form of no hand reaching out to take yours.

It will stand alongside you in every conversation, nearly unbearable in its silence that fairly screams.

It will brush its teeth with you at night and climb into bed with you when finally you let go of this day. 

Even as it goes always with you, it will manage to startle you with its presence, causing you to weep when you enter the empty kitchen in the morning, when you spread fresh sheet on the bed you shared, when you walk out through the door alone and pass back through it likewise.

It is here you will know it best- in the moments that made up the rhythm of your days, that fashioned the litany of your life, the togethering you will never know in the same way again. 

But I will tell you it is here, too, that your solace lies. It will wait for you in those same moments that stun you with their sorrow. 

I cannot tell you how, but it will not cease to carry you in the cadence that has forever altered but whose echo will persist with a stubbornness that will surprise you, bearing you along, breathing with you still through the terrible and exquisite ordinary days. 

A poem by Jan Richardson

I never thought

 Washing my Master's body.

I never thought that I would be the one.  

I never thought that I'd be there. 

I never thought I'd want to. 

I never thought I'd be able to.  

I certainly never thought it would be an unspeakable combination of sacred and horror.

My Master died at 7:00 am on Friday morning.  We had him home on hospice, where he wanted to be, before he became incoherent.  Death is a horrifying thing up close, probably no matter how it happens.  I had been sleeping next to him in the living room, he had one of those hospital beds there.  His breath was getting more and more labored.  With a rattle sound the hospice nurses had warned us about.   I have seen enough animals in the process of dying that when he started the gasp death reflex I called the hospice nurse.  I got Matt, who was also on call the night we brought Master home and called him in a panic because we were having trouble with medications.  He came to our house at 9 pm and spent almost 2 hours with us, figuring out the right dosages.  He wrote out a schedule and I stuck to it day and night, taking night shifts with other family members, but still barely sleeping. I could only really sleep in the recliner chair right next to his bed. When I tried to go upstairs to sleep during someone else's shift I mostly just lay awake.

It was again Matt on the phone when I called that Friday morning and I remember my exact words: 

"He is doing that gasping thing that animals do when they are dying". 

His reassuring, confident voice said, unsurprised by my weird comparison, "It's time to wake everyone up so they can say goodbye". Which I did.

Another hospice nurse and some other people came out to the house to establish the official time of death, but it was 20 minutes later than my Master's real, true time of death. She was the one that suggested we might want to wash him, but she was ok doing it if we didn't want to. My Master's mother and I did this sacred duty. To wash him. Before he was taken away.

I never thought it would be me.

His mother, I'm sure, never thought it would have to be her.

I don't know how to cope with this

 Besides just missing my Master terribly all day long, I don't know how to cope with just life's demands.  I know other people do it, but I don't know HOW they do it.

I'm working 8-4.  I get up at 5 and try to sort out the house for a few minutes in between getting ready to go.   I drop one kid off in the morning and I have the other kid doing the morning puppy care routine- letting out of kennels, playing with, feeding etc.  

I pick the kid up again at 5 because she's got clubs and plays after school every day, without coming home first, and then make dinner and do the sheep/puppy/dog chores.  By the time I get done with that and eating it's about 7:00.  It's dark so I can't really do anything else outside.  I can have a cup of tea and watch tv a bit.  I go to bed at 9 so I can get up at 5 again. 
Note: there's really no house cleaning or dish washing or sorting of mail and doing bills in that schedule.  If I want to do that stuff I can start it at 7 pm when I'm all tired out and totally unwilling to do any of it.   

Things I don't have time for anymore: writing, painting, walking, movies, friends, Pokemon.  

Brokenhearted

 Blessing for the Brokenhearted

Let us agree for now that we will not say that the breaking makes us stronger or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love.

Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound when every day our waking opens it anew.

Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery of how a heart so broken can go on beating, as if it were made precisely for this-

as if it knows the only cure for love is more of it,

as if it sees the heart's sole remedy for breaking is to love still

as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom but it will save us nonetheless.

Jan Richardson in The Cure for Sorrow

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