An Awkward Shape

Grief is an awkwardly shaped thing. It doesn't quite belong, like a square peg in a dizzyingly vast sea of round holes. It's a big offensively shaped block that shows up when all your other Tetris blocks are well organized and devoid of holes. It's a bulky foreign sculpture you don't know how to fit into your neatly packed suitcase - you don't even know how you got saddled with it in the first place. Grief is one of the stepsisters' right foot, too big to fit in a dainty glass slipper that belongs to someone else. And if you know the story, you understand that it will never fit.

I lost my mum a few months ago.

Isn't it weird that the phrase uses the word "lost"? As if I simply misplaced her one day, and she is somehow in that enchanted place where one sock seem to always end up in during laundry day. It's not like she's lost because she took a few wrong turns one day; although, if you know my mum at all, you would have agreed that she had a gift for getting lost while driving. She's not lost. I am.

I think that when someone leaves us, whether they have embraced death or they are still very much alive, the one who is lost isn't the one who left. The one who is lost is the one who is left behind. Grief is the feeling of being lost.

Don't I know it.

This year, 2021, I had finally felt at home in my own body. After three decades of life, I had felt like I'm the most me. I'm not perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination. I was just content with being myself. It's a feeling or a state of being that was completely foreign to me. The feeling was short lived.

Mum passed quite suddenly, yet another casualty to the pandemic that has left no country untouched. At first I was in shock. After the funeral, the floodgates opened and I was sad. I expected all of that. What I didn't expect was the aftermath. I don't feel quite myself. I live out my days like I normally would, but I don't feel like myself. Even my clothes don't feel like they belong to me. The shoes I once loved don't fit. I'm no longer the rightful owner of the glass slipper. I'm a stepsister.

Something has changed. Something's out of place. It rattles me in such a way that I feel like I'm out of place. Out of time. Floating around on the surface of the waters, alive and buoyant but untethered. I realize that this is grief.

I thought that, after experiencing my dad's passing seven years ago, I knew all there is to expect in grieving. I was wrong. It's impossible to be an expert in grief. Each occurrence of grief creates its own unique substance. Its characteristics inimitable; it is entirely impossible for one to study it, to make its unknowable attributes knowable or even to master it. Grief can't be mastered. Nor can it be molded to fit into the organizational pockets of our lives.

Grief doesn't fit.

Grief is also a shape-shifter. Time doesn't make it easier. Time doesn't make grief disappear. All time does is change it. And it does. Change, I mean. It morphs from one awkward shape to another. But it's there. Solid and irreverent. At family Christmases. At weddings. At other people's funerals. In the first moments of checking in to a vacation spot. Subconscious midnight dialing to a phone number long left behind.

I think this is the part where I lose everyone else. People understand the shock. People empathize with the tears. But the aftermath? The aftermath makes them uncomfortable. The aftermath makes people squirm. Silently, in the undercurrent of interactions with me, is the question: When can you go back to normal? The answer to that is: Never. But some of the people I've interacted with, some of the people in my life, just doesn't get that. They think that grief is something you get over. Something that you can mold into a pretty little figurine that you display on the shelf that is your life. A reminder, but one that fits in its pretty little spot.

So I make it look and sound like that's what has happened. That I'm somehow over it. That I'm back to normal. It's easier this way, less of people tiptoeing around me and less of people squirming. In conversations, my grief is forgotten by everyone but myself. But this girl has a pretty good poker face - years of being a Pastor's Kid have trained her face for such a challenge. I tell you, though, it's there. Grief never left. And the shape it shifts into? I have no control over that. I have also let go of my need to control grief.

Grief is there in all its glory, unashamedly present, constantly out of place and time.

Accepting that is not defeat, I have found out. Accepting that is a form of worship.

There's only one way grief can fit and not chafe. It is if I place grief on an open hand. It doesn't have to fit a certain shape. It doesn't have to be given a higher purpose. It doesn't have to be repurposed to somehow inspire people around me. It just needs to be acknowledged. Grief fits in an open hand. Grief can only "fit" in surrender.

I found this in a book I read a couple of months ago, and the words just echoed in the body that doesn't feel quite at home anymore.

"I have learned to hold not only [this] but everything in my life with an open hand, trusting that no matter what, Yahweh is good." - Connilyn Cosette, To Dwell Among Cedars

Surrendering my need for everything to make sense, surrendering the expectation that things should be normal, and just holding grief with its ever-shifting shape in my open hand is how I worship. In the not-goodness of loss and death, I surrender to the One that is good. Even though I have more questions than answers. Even though my surrender comes with tears of anger mixed with sorrow. Somehow, in that friction is worship. Somehow, in that friction is faith. And then I get to rest for a little while because I don't have to pretend I can make sense of something that humans cannot tell left or right from.

They're there. All of them. The grief, or shall I say griefs, from present and past losses in their current shapes. And I find that I'm really OK with them being there.