Letting the heart feel what it wants to feel
Your disenfranchised grief is always welcome here.
Today, at the altar of grief, I lay my breakup.
Barely a day fresh, carried through a sleepless night of crying more tears than I thought it possible to cry over a man I dated for nine months. My eyes are red, swollen. My mind is an endless loop of moments shared and hoped for, and words, so many words that will never be spoken, that I’d like to believe could have steered us to a different place had they been uttered sooner or more directly. Or perhaps we would have landed exactly here, only earlier. And I might have had a more bearable ache to hold.
But I know grief. We are old friends, longing a familiar companion. And the more I keep opening, which is the only path for me, the more I’m invited to practice letting in and letting go, gathering joy and sitting with sorrow. Trusting, though it hurts, in some great truth and wild grace to guide me on this ground.
Still, this sadness startles me. So deep. So big. So everything I didn’t expect to feel. I could circle around reason after reason that my eyes keep pooling. Last night, my mom asked if I were in love with this man. It may seem that after nine months, I should be. But we were casual for so long, coming together from the fullness of our individual lives to make magic in the moment and then returning to our worlds, without ever folding each other into them, without the everyday tending that nurtures connection, starts to build some scaffolding.
And I was OK with that. Because he was my first relationship since the six-year partnership I’d left after my dad died. Because I hadn’t dated in years, would only dip my toe in now and then to retreat back to my life, replete with the riches of friendship, creativity, adventure and so much that brought me fulfillment, it never felt lacking. I was living, and if love came along, I would welcome it as a beautiful bonus.
But I was also, unconsciously, being cautious. Because loss had ripped through my heart three years in a row — along with the end of my long-term relationship, my mom’s partner, whom I’d loved like a father, died the year before my dad did — and there are barriers we build without realizing it. Parts of ourselves we lock away without noticing their absence. Stirrings maybe we learn to silence or sculpt into something else.
Maybe I did love this man, or was beginning to. It’s been so long since I’ve been in love I genuinely can’t remember how the shifting line feels, how we’re carried from enchantment and affection to a lavish, whole-body bloom. But I do know somewhere along our journey, I started to believe we would unfold into more. And I wanted that. After years of devoted singlehood, and attendant ambivalence about my desire to be in a relationship, I finally felt ready. Held out hope for it. Until I began to feel the weight of my waiting. The chafe of being in a space with so much to give and so little room to let that sweetness flow. I knew what I was worthy of and this, our passionate but loosely defined entanglement, was not it.
A month ago, we met to say goodbye. It was dusk. We sat on a bench in the park, between us an honest, tender spill from the rupture where our yearnings diverged. We cried. We hugged long and deep, falling away from each other only to fall back in. We rambled, away from the matter at heart, to other threads, stories, even laughter, the way we would always relax into long and generous conversation. Neither of us wanted to leave. Heavy rains came, and we moved to sit in his car. The park ranger drove by and warned us the park was closing. We drove, in our separate cars, back to his apartment, where we lingered into the morning that would begin these last few weeks of limbo.
Until last night and the ending we could no longer avoid, as we sat within the shelter of my beloved spruce in my courtyard and embraced for one last time.
And now today, at the altar of grief, I lay my breakup.
I come because, maybe like me, you, too, have been in an ambiguous relationship. Haven’t been together for long. Maybe you, too, have been tiptoeing your way into something real that’s suddenly capsized or dissolved. Perhaps after years of withholding your heart, you’ve been ready to share it, but instead are facing emptiness where you thought that love could live.
I’m here to tell you, it’s OK to grieve. To feel shattered. To give yourself to an ocean of tears. To ruminate on what was and could have been. To be stunned, as it courses through you, by this seismic emotional tide.
People may wonder why you are so sad. Rush to name the reasons it wasn’t meant to be or suggest the better you’ll one day find. They may hold you to an arbitrary “x” amount of time spent together to deem your loss worthy of your tears. Why weep when you didn’t live together, were’t married, didn’t have kids? How could it hurt so much when you hadn’t gazed into the long lens of the future together? Been a part of each other’s everyday? Breathed the words “I love you”?
Yesterday, I facilitated a grief walk where during our closing circle, I invited the group to share whatever was moving through them and wanted to be witnessed. As one person after another spoke of the death of a loved one, and often multiple loved ones in a brief span of time, I felt the weaving of compassion that happens when we share our sorrows in community. And I also wondered about those who carried other changes and losses unrelated to death. How maybe they felt they couldn’t possibly speak them into this circle of so many bereaved. How they might have been judging the significance of what they carried compared to the orphaned daughter and orphaned son, the woman holding the death of seven loved ones in only two years, the stories of cancer’s sudden ravaging, a stark gun violence toll.
My heart ached for the heaviness, the unfathomable proffered again and again. But it also hurt for the unexpressed. The disenfranchised grief that is never acknowledged, asked about, met with gentleness and care. The losses that others don’t recognize as worthy of being honored and held, for however long it takes.
Here, at this altar where I lay my breakup, there is room for you, too. Please, bring what trembles inside, what bruises and storms and keeps you up at night. Leaves you swimming in tears. Makes you awkward and uncomfortable as you bear its teeth clawing inside your skin.
I see you, and I welcome you.
And though it may be small or no consolation, I also offer this:
Last night, as sleep eluded me and I repeatedly squeezed my eyes tight, marveling at the surfeit of tears soaking my pillow, I met this moment of awareness: Oh, to touch everything, the ache and burn, and not turn away. To be a willing fountain. A desperate hunger knocking at love’s door. To stay open to every wave, even if they led me back to other seasons of loss, and trust where each would take me.
What a gift. To be so alive. Attuned to the body’s only language, this raw depth of feeling that’s where the healing begins.
An invitation to practice
A few days ago, as I was sitting in meditation, I was drawn to place my hand on the back of my right heel, which has been sore for the last week. When I did, simply letting myself feel the warmth of my own touch, I heard the words, “It’s OK to leap. You will find a soft place to land.” A premonition of the hard conversation to come later that week? Of the choice to leave a relationship that could not meet my needs? Perhaps. But maybe it was also a gentle reminder of the wisdom our body holds when we make the time to listen. I invite you to try this practice for yourself.
Join me for Good Grief
This incredibly special project brings together two of my favorite things — grief and poetry, all wrapped in the healing balm that is community. Last January, I took part in GRIEF, LOSS, AND GOOD GAINS, a three-day poetry intensive offered through SIFTMedia 215, with the woman I like to call Philly’s high priestess of poetry, Ursula Rucker. She took us on a powerful journey, inviting our cracked hearts to spill their truth and beauty on the page with her own transparency, vulnerability and unstinting realness.
Eighteen of us worked with Ursula for three days to discuss, share and offer each other healing around grief of all kinds. We were also invited to record our poems at Lil’ Drummaboy Recordings in Philly, culminating in the creation of Memoir Poetry. Eight of the poems/poets were paired with SIFT members/filmmakers to transform the poems into films. And now these creative, beautiful, inspiring visual stories will be shared with public.
I’m excited to see my poem “Roots” brought to life onscreen and am deeply grateful to filmmaker Tatiana Bacchus, who brought so much joy, talent and vision to transforming it into a visual work of art with the help of Destiny Cox.
I hope you’ll join me for this special night on Wednesday, July 31, at Moore College of Art and Design.
The screening includes a mixer, performance by Ursula Rucker, filmmaker Q&A and a post-screening reception. Register at SIFTMedia 215.
An in-person death doula training in Philly area
Angie Buchanan of The Death Midwife and Earth Traditions will be coming to Media, Pa., Aug. 9-11 to offer her death midwife certification training. I studied with Angie in 2018. She was not only deeply wise and knowledgeable but warm, funny and generous — and her training was a great mix of the practical, spiritual and emotional aspects of death care, as well as an exploration of what is grief and how to both navigate it and support others who are grieving.
You can learn more about the course and sign up here.
Sending you love and tenderness and great appreciation for your experience, for your wisdom and for this post. Thank you for your wise and open heart.
Beautiful words and such a beautiful heart. May it be held tenderly and lovingly by all of us who love you ❤️