Everyday Losses: An Opportunity to Befriend Grief
As many of us have begun the transition from summer to fall, I’ve been thinking about everyday losses.
Last week I watched my kids – a 5th grader and a 1st grader – walk together to their first day of school. The moment held all of the mixed emotions that first days of school often bring: the buzzing anticipation of a new year, the relief of a quiet house, the slight ache of knowing that my kids are one year closer to adulthood.
This year was different, though. This year is my daughter’s last at our sweet little neighborhood school, which happens to be right across the street from my house. Next year she’ll be off to middle school, and because of their age gap, my kids won’t be in the same school again. This is the one and only year that they’ll walk to school together, the one and only year when I can look out my front window and imagine them both tucked inside those walls.
A few years ago I might have said that the transition was bittersweet. I probably would have even pushed away my feelings, telling myself not to think about the future and to simply focus on the present.
And while I did, in fact, set an intention to savor this year and to be present to it as much as I can, I also did something that I probably wouldn’t have done a few years ago: I let myself feel the ache in my chest, and I called it what it was. I called it grief.
We think of grief as something that comes to us in the big moments: the deaths, illnesses, job losses, and relationship endings. But the truth is that grief visits us all the time. Life is full of loss after loss after loss, even when we don’t always recognize it. I remember a moment after my husband and I brought our oldest child home after her birth, and we realized with a sudden jolt that our family of two was gone forever. Even as I held my very wanted and celebrated baby, I felt the ache of loss, realizing that the early years of our marriage were forever a thing of the past.
Grief presents us with everyday opportunities to get to know it better – to allow in its ache and to let that inform what matters most to us. If we’re willing to allow it in, grief has a lot to tell us about what we might want to pull in closer.
And while it's true that there’s no preparing for our most profound losses, I wonder how much more equipped we might be if we acknowledged and allowed our grief in the little moments and not just the big ones. What if grief were not a complete stranger to us when it darkens our door with our heaviest blows?
What might it look like to be open to grief’s presence in your life, even in the everyday? How might it feel to allow it in? And how might that feeling help you tune into and appreciate what is most precious and important to you, right now?
As always, take gentle care of yourself.
