Grief Will Want to Own You

At 52 potentially ripe years of age, this is who I want to be. This is who I’m in a battle with some worn out but reliable manifestation of myself to become. I used to be who I want to become in bits and parts. I sense that before I can even remember I was her, complete and whole.

Life will break you. It will make you question if anything was ever real–if you ever saw anything clearly. 

Loss will try to convince you that every thing and person that gives meaning to your life is in imminent danger at some point on most any given day. You just didn’t see it clearly before. Look away, find peace in a moment and something else will be destroyed.

Betrayal will want you to believe that you’ll never be worthy of love. “See,” it will say. “All of the books you read and the compromises you made and the compassion you gave, and the counsel you sought, and you still couldn’t figure it out. Look at everything about you that is just too much and you still weren’t enough.”

Familiarity and Habit will want you to believe that they are the only true safety you have. They will want you to think that if you do everything just right, if you don’t make any mistakes, if you stick with what you know, there’s no way you could stumble. At least not enough that you would break open and expose your bones and vital organs again.

And just in case you doubt Loss or Betrayal or Familiarity and Habit, Grief will have you covered. Grief will say, “You’ve been here before. I can take you to your knees if you let me go uncontrolled. But I have another offer for you. You know shit’s gonna fall apart, so go ahead and break it yourself. Rather than sit with the joy and the mystery and the newness of your body electric, go ahead and take control. Surrender to grief imagined, and I promise not to break open your bones so that I can settle into the marrow next time I visit you for something real.

But at 52 potentially ripe years of age, I want to wash those wounds clean. I want to untangle the knots that live in me under the guise of holding me together. This is who I want to be.

I want to be the woman whose mind is free of exhausting rumination and whose heart is always cracked open just a little bit so that Life can more easily access it.   

I want to be the woman who can open to the tender touch and the urgent pumping blood of a lover meant to fill me up without the burden of fulfilling me.

I want to be the woman who pauses when my dog catches my eye from the place where she is stretched out lounging in a spot of sunlight on the carpet. As she wags her tail, I want to lay down with her in that warmth, nose to nose, to envelope her in a mental image of love and acceptance.

I want to be the woman who lives in her body–who appreciates the beauty of its curves, the strength of its utility, the wear of its experience and the enormous possibility of its pleasure. I want to care for this body and explore the unknown secrets it holds. 

I want to be the woman who does not require the declaration by another of her beauty and intrigue and intelligence but who is enough herself, like the whole person she starts to recall from so long ago, that she illuminates the beauty and intrigue and intelligence of others in such a way that it freely flows between them.

I want to be all of the parts, bruised and broken and mended and hopeful, that make me luminously whole.