grief – The Oaxacaborn Blog

The one thing you cant do when you're a sojourner (a post on #grief from the Oaxacaborn blog)

When you’re a sojourner, you miss milestones. You miss friends’ graduation open houses, you miss engagement parties, you miss their weddings. You see the highlights, but you miss all the late nights. You miss the unsung moments that expand gloriously to fill the spaces between each infrequent occasion we mark with a long distance text, or an even less-frequent card.

And then, as time passes, you start missing something else, too.

You miss the funerals.

Your friend dies, and you can’t be there for the funeral.

Your friend’s mother dies, and you can’t be there for the funeral.

Your friend’s baby dies, and you can’t be there for the funeral.

It is not true that distance makes the heart grow fonder. Distance actually makes the heart swell with grief, makes ones whole being ache deeply, wearily, at the realization that

you

can’t

there.

Distance means you can’t be there

to silently hold,

to cry alongside,

to weep together.

They tell you nothing is the best thing to say in the face of grief.

They don’t tell you how impossible it is to fill a blank card with mutual tears, fold it into a stiff envelope, and drop it down down down into the unknown darkness, where it will sail away, carried by unsuspecting hands, and finally land in a faraway box, alone and a bit worn around the edges.

They tell you just to be there.

And that’s the one thing you can’t do, when you’re a sojourner.

Poetry & Words, Theology

Five Months Ago, She Slipped Away

July 2, 2014June 23, 2022 Gina @ Oaxacaborn

photo (16)

Five months ago, she was met with the loudest hallelujahs.

I didn’t hear any of them.

Five months ago, she slipped free from this realm.

I’m still earthbound.

These five months have been the longest, and the shortest. It feels like I should be able to walk backwards, at any time, and fall right back into where I was when we were all a decade younger and a decade louder and only a decade away from the day when she’d fly home, right there, in front of all of us.

Oh, if we would have known then that those Friday nights were once-in-a-lifetime, if we would have known then that’s all we were given on this side of the sky. But we didn’t know, of course; we never knew and we still don’t know. Today we might very well be sitting inside the same kind of golden moment that will we’ll look back on from the next decade, the same golden moment that we will look back on through the fading edges of time. We’ll want to grab it; but we won’t be able to.

But we can hold on to this moment we’re sitting inside of now.

We can hold onto it now, and hold on to our people, and hold onto it all while we can, hold onto it with open arms and wild abandon and the kind of joy that’s poured out of heaven’s lap itself — we can hold onto it all until it’s time to let go. And then we’ll hold onto our God, and he’ll hold onto us, and he’ll hold us there in the storm so we won’t fold over when the winds grows fierce and the winds rip up the roots and the winds change it all.

And in the quietness and in the roar, through the tears and the laughter and the journeys that make up everyday living, I can sing —

— it is well

it is well

it is well with my soul.

Poetry & Words, Theology

She’s outside of time. We’re in it.

February 13, 2014June 23, 2022 Gina @ Oaxacaborn

One week and three days. That’s how long it’s been since Holly left this earth. Thirty years she lived on this side of eternal life.

“We are not alone / We are more than flesh and bone / What is seen will pass away / What is not is going home…” –Andrew Peterson

[Donate in Holly’s memory to the The Ziway + Adami Tulu Project]

And now, she’s home.

She’s dancing in the pure Light, healed.

She’s outside of time. We’re in it. She’s free, and we’re trapped, feeling deeply the ebb and flow of new grief, constantly aware of life’s frailty.

The thing about death, you know, is that the living keep on living.

“The living can’t quit living,” Wendell Berry writes. “They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.”

And so we can’t quit. We don’t. We keep on, changed. Our perspectives shift, our priorities shift, our vision is altered. But we don’t quit.

We mourn, but not without hope. We grieve, but not without hope.

Hope is the anchor.

Hope points me to the “holy shores of uncreated light“, and the One who lights the way.

“‘Praise, Praise!’ I croak. Praise God for all that’s holy, cold, and dark. Praise him for all we lose, for all the river of the years bears off. Praise him for stillness in the wake of pain. Praise him for emptiness. And as you race to spill into the sea, praise him yourself, old Wear. Praise him for dying and the peace of death.

…Now that I can hardly walk, I crawl to meet him there. He takes me in his chilly lap to wash me of my sins. Or I kneel down beside him till within his depths I see a star.

Sometimes this star is still. Sometimes she dances. She is [Holly]’s star. Within that little pool of Wear she winks at me. I wink at her. The secret that we share I cannot tell in full. But this much I will tell. What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.” -Frederick Buechner

Poetry & Words, Theology

It is early in the days of new grief

February 5, 2014June 23, 2022 Gina @ Oaxacaborn

The grief will change us It is early in the days of new grief, and the sorrow comes in waves, tidal, like the roaring surge of surf just before the crash, just before the sea glass scatters, rearranged, just before the shelled critters scurry backwards into the sand.

I lie awake in the stillness, awake until just before the periwinkle dawn. I’m afraid to close my eyes because I don’t want to forget. In the morning, I blink, I sit up, and for eight fleeting, transitory seconds, I’ve forgotten. Then the grief crashes in, then I remember, and the flood of tears roll down.

Maybe the grief will always come like the ocean’s tide, glistening like December topaz, glistening like the salty water that rearranged the Klamath coast every year. The river ran through it, always shifting, always flowing, always shaping the earth around it. Some years the driftwood arranged itself into gentle patterns and the sands fell smooth, sloping down gently into the brackish river. And some years the dunes rose high, and the winds whipped, and the gnarled branches of petrified wood were tangled in between the constant rise and fall of frothy waves.

Like the river against the stones, the ocean against the glass, and the mouth of the ocean against the changing shore, the grief will change me.

It will change us.

Every year, it will look different.

The river will continue to ebb and flow, the shoreline will be carved and smoothed, the waters will rise and fall, the glass will be broken and polished, the winds will breathe in and out.

He makes all things beautiful in His time.

Poetry & Words, Theology

1997-2004 :: On Grief and the Golden Thread

November 12, 2013June 23, 2022 Gina @ Oaxacaborn

Oaxacaborn - Gabriel B. - On Grief and the Golden Thread

Oaxacaborn blog - Gabriel B. - On Grief and the Golden Thread

God, who are we
to moan and weep
when it is not he
but we
who sleep?

GABRIEL B., NOVEMBER 12, 1997 – JULY 10, 2004

I remember where I was sitting when I heard it was coming, and how I got up out of my chair and ran down the hallway, blind from hot tears, not knowing where I was going, and I remember how the sun burned down when I stood there on the porch, and I looked up, and knew in an instant he was gone. It felt wrong for the sun to be so bright, it felt wrong to be breathing; and later, it felt wrong for berries to be so vividly blue, it felt wrong to taste their broken sweetness, twisted as they were into the batter of the pancakes we ate out back, under the deep-rooted oak.

But color doesn’t fade when grief comes; it is only blurred for a moment because our vision trembles. But it doesn’t fade; it doesn’t rust and it doesn’t crumble, because “we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed”.* It shines, and it is brilliant in color, and it is love, and “Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.”**

My vision trembles from time to time, again, even now over the years; I see the blur in a memory, in notes of a song, or in the way sun shoots down through the woolen clouds even when it’s most dark. I see the blur, and I know it is well with my soul.

Today is different than that day because I’ve learned it’s not wrong for the sun to be so bright, it’s not wrong to revel in the taste of the blueberry or the way the daffodil splits the earth in the spring.

“The living can’t quit living…They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.”**

*Hebrews 10:39
**Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter