Gratitude and grief go hand in hand
And my hands are so tired
Before, it used to make me roll my eyes when people said things like “every day is a gift.”
I have had many days that did not feel like gifts. I’ve lived through days that felt like burdens. There have been many days that I would have rather skipped or just not woken up for. The idea that every day is a gift sounded like something only really comfortable people living really easy lives would say. Then, something changed.
What changed was that I experienced a mother’s love for the first time, and suddenly I understood this seemingly trite mantra in a way I never had before. Every day I remained pregnant was a gift: one more day cooking safely in the oven. Even when my son came 6 weeks early, suddenly every day was a gift because I got to be with him and hold him and smell him and he was alive and so was I. I got 42 extra days with him and each one of them was the greatest day of my life.
Today, as I was sitting in my car during my lunch break at work, my grief finally overflowed. I broke down crying. There are too many parents who will never know another day with their children. The images of shell-shocked children trembling from acts of egregious violence are burned into my mind. I put my arm around my son’s tiny shoulders every day and they’re so delicate, so small and soft and the perfect size to be cradled. Lately, all I can think about is those children in Palestine and their quivering shoulders, the arms that can never wrap around them again. I think about children ripped to shreds in my own country by guns that shouldn’t even exist, let alone be placed in the hands of a person. I wrap my arms around my son’s tiny body and feel the pain of so many mothers carving holes in my stomach, an unfathomable pain that reverberates so loudly across the collective these days that it’s hard for me to hear anything else.
There’s no right or wrong way to grieve.
But you have to grieve.
You can do it publicly or in solitude. You can throw yourself headfirst into it or you can take it in bite-sized pieces. You can allow grief to destroy you and you can allow it to make you whole again. But you have to grieve.
I could go into detail about the reasons why I believe the society I live in has no practices in place for healthy grieving, but other, smarter people have done that already. I want to skip to the part everyone gets to eventually, which is that we’ve been conditioned to grieve in a particular way (or not at all) and that way is more conducive to maintaining the status quo than it is conducive to actual resolution and acceptance. At the core of it all is the fact that we cannot resolve, nor can we accept the conditions of the present moment, and to make grieving culturally acceptable would mean confronting the horrors of the present moment—and even our participation in them.
That’s why you have to grieve. All the reasons it would be more convenient for us all to ignore the gnawing sensation of loss in the air are the same reasons why we must allow ourselves to grieve.
Every day is a gift, and I see that now. I’m only able to recognize that because I’ve opened myself up to grief. There is grief inherently within love, and when it comes to a mother’s love, that grief is colored by the knowledge that there are so many things which can keep you from tucking your babies safely into bed for another night. Togetherness is so tenuous, and it becomes more obvious as the needs of your children change and thus alter the very nature of your relationship. Each morning is an initiation. Each night is a small death. And every day is a gift.
