Sadness comes and sadness goes.

Sometimes the presence of pain is stronger than its absence. These days, my highs are so high and my lows are so low it’s a miracle I’m functioning at all.

I wonder where my grandmother is and if she knows I don’t know what to do with her death and I wonder if that’s ok.

I think of my mother and that she’s lost her mom and the enormity of that is just too vast for my mind to grasp. How can you lose your mother? How? I know this is life and people die all the time and also people are born. Energy and love recycled.

Nothing is lost.

I think of these things and I feel so much I have to write it down and when I can’t see what I’m writing anymore I roll out a yoga mat that’s not mine and I sit on it and cry into the emptiness of my reflection staring back at me from the living room window.

I cry until I can’t breathe and still it’s just scratching at the surface of what needs to be felt and moved through and let out. I cry and then I stop and I go back to bed.

My friend who I love dearly lost her mother and I spent so much time pondering that even though that loss wasn’t mine and it happened years ago. I tried to put myself in her place to understand just a fraction of what she had gone through but I couldn’t.

What would my world be like without my mom? It’s no world.

I can’t even see it in my mind as an imaginary place

My friend lives and breathes even though her mother no longer does and she moved through it and she laughs and teaches yoga and smiles all the time but what goes on inside of her heart I don’t know. Its been years but still – what is a world without your mother? It’s too big. I can’t feel it even though this year I lost so much.

And now my grandmother is gone and she is my mothers mother and I wonder, how and why is this the order of things. My mother lost her mother and I lost my grandmother and even though we lost the same person our losses are so different. I want to be there for my mom and I know what pain is because this was the year the universe decided it was my time to feel. I know pain but my mothers pain is another world.

Our mothers are our beginnings. They choose us and we choose them our lives begin there. At some point they die and we keep living and it’s the order of things but still it makes no sense.

People die. All the time. Mothers and grandmothers and best friends and dogs. They die and when they go they leave you things like yoga mats and trees that are suddenly alive in your garden and also your mother.

They take a lot.

But they leave you things that are everything. You think they died and took it all but actually they died so they could leave you these everythings.

So you lost a lot but you have so much.

Your heart is bigger now and there is more room for noticing things like what the wind feels like on your cheek in the morning.

But you have lost your ground and you have to stumble through the dark not knowing where to place your feet or how to protect yourself from the newness of life ahead. And sometimes you wake yourself up crying in the middle of the night and it’s loud but it’s quiet and there are dogs in your bed but not the one you dream of over and over again and in your dreams you keep losing him in malls and in the woods and at airports and it’s not your fault but it is. And then your husband squeezes your hand and you know the dog is not lost but with grandmothers and soul sisters because when we pass everyone is found.

Everyone is found. The rest of us continue.

One day we will find our way too but for now we are still fumbling through the darkness with trembling hands and beating hearts wondering where to place our feet next.

I think of these things and I feel so much I have to write it down and when I can’t see what I’m writing anymore I roll out a yoga mat that’s not mine and I sit on it and cry into the emptiness of my reflection staring back at me from the living room window.

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Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: courtesy of Rachel Brathen