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