death, love, and grief

Hi friends! It’s been quite a day (a Tuesday when I write this to you). I had some health things that came up, so I just wanted to say take care of yourselves and check in on loved ones. It sucks that so many I love live far from me and I have to relay news to them after the worst of it has come. I’m okay but please do take care of yourselves.

Lately I’ve been thinking about death. With the loss of my family’s handyman Steve and it being the season of Lent, the emotions have risen to the surface and death is on the mind. We cannot control or foretell when people pass. They just do. And you’re there, to bear the memory of their presence, a tiny flicker of a flame that was once a wildfire. Sometimes I think about my aunt who passed a few years back, and her hearty joy and the beauty of her laughter, and I feel sad because I never knew what I had until it was gone.

Ash Wednesday, the day we are to remember we are dust, this year, fell on the same day as gooey-eyed lovers whispered sweet nothing to each other and bought intoxicating red roses as declarations of affection. Valentine’s Day never haunts me, but it always reminds me love is not something I control. Love is not forced or coerced—that is not love. I remember talking to a dear friend years ago about love and how we cannot choose when it enters our lives. We also do not choose when it leaves. Hilary Yancey speaks about wild gifts, “For people are wild gifts from a God with wildly good purposes. And the story belongs to Him.”

This post isn’t meant to be sad, but reminiscent. There are loves we’ve lost that we want back. 

I’ve never been good at observing Lent, good at sacrificing what is most dear to me, even for a short season. I debated giving up tea and then promptly rejected that notion. Is grief what happens when what we love is lost and there is nothing we can do to regain it? 

I was watching A Walk to Remember again. Such a lovely old movie that managed to portray Christianity in somewhat a positive light (even if the main character seems out of touch with being “cool”). When Landon read Jamie 1st Corithians 13, there were tears in my eyes (the whole movie is a tearjerker). 

A few days after Valentine’s Day, my friend Trisha asked a question that pierced my heart a little. It’s hard to explain that love exists in my life, even if its forms are not widely celebrated and acclaimed. I love my friends so darn much! But there is no anniversary for the joy of friendship (and though celebrating birthdays is the closest thing, it can be clouded by judgments of family). There is love in my life. It just never has existed romantically.

Love is in the gifts my brother gives me: a journal and a candle. Love is in my dad’s hugs (my favorite place to be–he gives the best hugs!). Love is my mother laboring over something she wants to give me—food, clothes, etc. 

Do you ever think of your funeral? I don’t. Not really. But I do think a little about the legacy I’ll leave. The stack of journals in my bedside drawer. I often imagine my children reading the words I write. (I know people say not to write with people in mind, but sometimes I do. Sometimes that person is me.) I hope I leave them with wisdom. Or memories of someone who tried their very best to follow truth and to love well. 

…

I started writing this about a week after V-Day and yet time keeps getting away from me. 

I’d love for my future self to show up out of the blue from a time machine and tell me somehow that everything works out. That somehow there is hope on the other side of the death of dreams and the death of loved ones, that love isn’t as elusive as it seems.

At the top of a playlist I made a year ago or two is Just A Lover by Hayley Williams. It’s a subtle one that moves into the obvious and it’s heady and nostalgic, and I was just telling a friend that I wanted a tattoo from it, whatever it was. The piano leans achy and the guitar comes in quite perfectly. 

Yesterday, I finished reading Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell and spoiler alert, Gaskell died before writing the ending and the story’s unfinished and maybe that’s why the grief hangs on for so long. There’s an empty space where there used to be this place for the love to go, and you thought the story would go on longer.

More than anything, you’re not alone in your grief and mourning. I believe after a season of darkness, there’s a season of light, of that bright glow that lifts the spirit.

A little playlist

• Don’t You Need Me by The Ready Set
• Daylily by Movements
• Loving Someone by The 1975
• One Sweet Love by Sara Bareilles
• Flowers on the Grave by The Maine (If you’re feeling grief, this one’s for you ❤️)

Signing off,

Gigi