Hope for Times of Pain & Uncertainty

My 40-year-old sister Melissa passed away from brain cancer on December 10. She was my only sibling, my best friend, my insides, my center of gravity.

My grief is deep and wide. I can’t come to you now pretending that there is anything else in my world that feels as important as making room for all of my grief, for all of my love for her, and for all of that the ways that my world will never be the same.

Sometimes life is just hard, hard, hard. There are some things that will never make sense, some things that will never be okay. 

I know my job right now is to sit in the mucky mess of it all and be open to my pain. To let it breathe and shift and change as it will. To know that it will soften and mold of its own accord, on its own timeline, and that the best I can do in the meantime is to surrender, to take good care of myself, and to let other people love me.

And yes, that sucks. And yes, sometimes I just want to figure out a way to make it all better. Sometimes I would happily take a get-out-of-jail-free card, a bypass of the pain, a way to time travel to the future where this all doesn’t hurt so much.

But I know those paths are nothing more than mirages and false promises. They don’t offer anything real. There is no such thing as a quick path to better. And there is most certainly no road back to before.

While the path I’m traveling is very different from the path we’ve all been asked to walk during this pandemic, there are no doubt many parallels. As we approach the two-year mark of a worldwide crisis, the road is still long and painful and uncertain. We are overwhelmed and burned out and weary. There is no going back to before. There is no telling when life will feel better.

The temptation is to ask ourselves questions like, “When will this be over? Who can I blame? How can I push through?” These are bypass questions. They are not the ones that take us on the path toward healing, that lead us back to ourselves. They are not the truth.

My truth is that I’m walking a road that is not necessarily going to get better. It is never going to be over. It will shift and change, and the edges will soften, but my sister will always be gone. I will always wish that she was still here. I have to learn how to live alongside that reality. 

As I learn how to do that, here is what I hope for myself, and what I also hope for you:

I hope you can remember that the only way forward is through, even when it hurts like hell. 

I hope you can lean into your pain, grieving what once was, finding ways to honor and carry it with you. 

I hope that sometimes you can let things be as bad as they really are and know that this means you’re going through a hard thing, not that something is wrong with you. 

I hope you can tell the truth about how hard and scary and painful life can be.

I hope you can connect with others who are also willing to be truth-tellers. I hope that you can be the first one to be brave and vulnerable and see what beautiful things can happen when you let others see inside.

I hope you can trust that sometimes there is nothing you need to do except let things be exactly as they are, let yourself be exactly as you are, and to know that things will change and soften as they will, when they will.

I hope that as you walk this long road that you can find a place to rest your weary head – a place not where you expect things to change, but where you can, for just a moment, find a tiny space to breathe.

I hope that you will let yourself be with your own feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty. I hope you know that you can trust yourself to find your way through.

I hope you will remember that life is never either/or, that joy and pain and wonder and grief can all exist right alongside each other.

I hope you will be a companion to yourself and treat yourself with exquisite kindness.

I hope you will let people love you.

These are my wishes for myself. These are my wishes for you.

As always, I’m rooting for you.