if the grief has gripped you

go gently

We don’t have lilacs in Texas, or at least in the part of Texas where I live. In New England they grow up alongside the houses, year over year showering us with small petals that hold a larger-than-life fragrance. They are beautiful in all those quieter ways: not as showy as peonies or garden roses or ranunculus, with a fragrance that often seems to live more in memory than in the moment. But I waited for them, growing up, and I’ve not quite lost the sense of them as a herald of the spring, of the blooming time, of the longer days and the wet, cold new earth turning over.

This week I was gripped by the fact of our departure - we really are going to leave this place, we really are leaving our house, our jobs, our church. It has been so quiet for so long in my mind that the sudden recognition of its closeness - a handful of weeks that scatter like grain from a farmer’s hand - it hit me, hard.

I feel almost paralyzed by it. The world is moving under me, and I’m barely hanging on.

“There is a difference between being on the horse, and staying on the horse, and riding.”

My trainer told me the other day as we were working on establishing connection through the bridle to do things more carefully. This is, in turn, handed down from her instructor, who almost certainly handing it down from his. Connection with the horse is both the culmination of and the beginning of communication, the start and the aim.

I think, perhaps, I must connect with my grief.

So let me begin here, a small list of lament:

The creak of these floorboards where I’ve walked each baby, night into the darker night. The green of the room where we brought each one home, some with humidifier tubing tied to the bars, some with swaddling blankets, some with tiny frog pacifiers.

The drive in the morning just after their drop off at school, the quick left, then right, and then into the bright sun squinting as I fumbled through morning prayer, memorized bits and forgotten others.

Turning the lights on in the kids’ room at Fabled, watching the magic there blossom to life, best friends lined up along shelves and facing me, a reminder to greet the day.

Stepping out of the philosophy building into that late afternoon sun, my head full of new thoughts. The friendship of the thinkers - alive and long-ago - and the gift of Aristotle’s mandate, which I carry with me, to only expect from any given study or endeavor the level of precision possible for it. To expect the blurred edges of philosophy, of life, of goodness and virtue. To expect my answers to evolve, to be imprecise.

The table in the West Waco library where I wrote every chapter of my dissertation, quietly, without much fanfare, but with so much love. The way it felt to put my hands to the plow of that work. The prayer on my couch that one day before the start of my final year of grad school, Lord let me love this, let this be an offering of love. The fullness of that love that persists now.

The barn - oh, God, you know, the barn. How can I say anything of this? The smell of it. The feel of the horse at the end of the lead rope. The first time I rode Frosty, the first time I cantered, the first time I understood the waterfall neck (“let him fall into your hands”), which if you’ve felt it, you will know. The promise that there is peace in wild things, that I can lay my head down on his soft side and he will stand in my uncertainty, in my grief, the way he held me in flashbacks of the NICU on my son’s birthday.

The fields of bluebonnets along highway 6, and behind speech therapy.

Opal’s, the champagne, and the oysters, and our selves so much more fully who they are than when we first married.

There is not enough space for the many lists I will make, of the small goodnesses that grip me in tenderness and fierceness, of the miraculous provisions that have seen us through, of the stones of remembrance we have left here -

to tell the stories from generation to generation, that there is provision, that there is miracle, that there is that unyielding, ever-faithful goodness that precedes and surrounds us and goes before us. The earth turns over. The lilacs are carried in memory to the next place, and the brightness does not fade.

And even now, as we leave, we follow it.