Grief Is A Great Excavator

This past Sunday, I stood in my yard with my family as my husband dug a hole for a rose bush, the yellow rose bush that we were planting as a memorial for his mom, who passed away three months ago. It seems odd to say that if she were here, she would have loved that we planted it for her, because if she were still here, we wouldn’t have done it. It wouldn’t have even occurred to me to plant flowers for other people in my garden. But now that she is gone, it seems like the most natural and obvious thing to do. 

It feels so strange to think of her now as “gone.” It’s on par with realizing that it’s been three months now. It feels like it’s been three weeks, and three years, simultaneously. The past three months have been heartbreaking and healing, isolating and connecting, terrible and beautiful. So much of everything, and it’s only when I sit and focus on it for a moment that the full scope of it returns to my awareness, and the tears begin to flow. 

We had no warning at all, and at the same time, we knew long before it happened. She was told in the fall of 2022 that her melanoma from years prior had returned, this time in her liver. Her initial reaction was fear, understandably, but what angered me was her statements while we were waiting on the biopsy results, that if it did turn out to be cancer, she wouldn’t be able to fight it. I didn’t realize at the time that she was simply telling us something that she intuitively knew to be true already. What I heard in her words was that she was already giving up, which in turn felt like giving up on us. On her family. That we were not worth fighting for. We weren’t even worth getting in the ring for.   

The reality, though, is that I don’t know what was going on in her heart or mind. I do know that she loved us to the fullest extent she was capable of, and she rejoiced in every moment she spent with us. I also know that she spent her life in fear, and didn’t take many chances in life. She struggled to trust people, often assumed the worst, and rarely believed that people loved and valued her. I watched her deprive herself of so many moments of potential joy and delight, because she didn’t trust life, God, or the Universe to have her back. She was afraid of joy, afraid of hope, and instead placed her faith in fear and anxiety. She thought this would protect her in some way, would keep her safer. But in reality, all it did was separate her from everything she truly, secretly wanted.  

Since she died, I have been splitting my time between working through my own feelings, meeting with my clients, taking care of the endless tasks around the house, attempting to hold space for my husband and kids, and stepping in to handle things when my husband’s grief takes him out of whatever he or we were planning on doing. Grief does not operate on a tidy timetable, it has no regard for your intentions, and it has a terrible habit of taking over whatever you were in the middle of doing, often at the worst possible moment. My husband and I have had intimate experience with this recently, as he can be fine one moment and barely able to function the next.  And I admit I have had a few moments like that myself. This has required us to set aside, sometimes willingly and sometimes reluctantly, whatever one of us was wanting or needing, so that that partner can step up and support the other.  But what I refuse to set aside is my joy, my gratitude, and my dreams.

If my mother-in-law’s life taught me anything, it was the danger in choosing fear over just about anything else. I don’t want that to be my legacy, and I don’t want to spend my life afraid to live it, afraid to open my heart in my relationships, afraid to let in joy and gratitude, afraid to chase exactly what I want.  And yet, since she died, I have felt so many of my own anxieties come up. It’s been a whirlwind ride through everything I thought I had laid to rest, every fear, every negative story coming up to cause me to question myself, my career, and my relationships. I wrote in my journal about a month after she died that grief is a great excavator. Everything has been coming up for us to sift through, and we are constantly facing the choice of whether we should keep that belief, story, behavior, or value, or toss it into the discard pile.  This has resulted in exhaustion and arguments, mingled with a strange sense of lightness and hope, as I begin to let go of the things that are no longer serving me, and dream into what the future might hold. Some of those things would be harder to do with my mother-in-law’s fears shadowing me. Because the reality is, the instinct to choose fear is a natural and normal one, and it tends to be contagious. As much as she wanted good things for all of us, she was afraid of those good things, and her fear caused both me and my husband to question and hold ourselves back many times. Now, her death gives me the inspiration to open myself up more to love, gratitude, joy, and creativity, in a way that I would have struggled to do while she was alive. Sometimes this creates a bit of an inner conflict in me, and at other times, I can hear her whispering to me “Go for it, love, life’s too short. I should know.”