“Everything is going to be okay,” I tried to sing to the tune of the Christmas carols that brought me to my knees the first holiday season after she was gone.
Now the words were hollow and flat, not even touching the ache in my heart. Because here’s the thing: there is no “okay” in grief. There is the loss, and then there is the hole in your life shaped like the person you lost. That hole doesn’t fill back up, I have come to realize. Time might heal wounds but it doesn’t fill holes and it certainly doesn’t bring anyone back. It’s been three years and I still think I sometimes see my mother out of the corner of my eye in a crowded grocery store or driving down the highway. The best I can hope for is that the raw edges scar over and I don’t have to walk around torn open and ragged forever.
I think this is why people struggle so much to find the words when someone is grieving. What do you say when you can’t say it will be okay? How do we comfort each other when the simple truth is life is so hard and loss is inevitable and it hurts like a son of a B pretty much forever?
And am I doing my kids a disservice by always promising that everything will be okay, when very likely it sometimes won’t be?
My youngest—the one who will never know his grandmother but has her eyes—came running to me last night, a fresh red welt on his forehead where he’d bumped it playing. I scooped him up, held him tight, and put my face down into his hair. Instinct kicked in and I started to say it, the usual, but then I paused and forced myself to inhale. I could smell his hair, the faintest traces of that baby smell that he had less of every day mixed with shampoo and the yogurt he had smeared on himself after dinner. His face was ruddy from crying and he grabbed fistfuls of my shirt and used it to wipe his eyes.
“I’m here,” I said quietly, trying it on. It felt right. It wasn’t a lie. “I’m here,” I said again, louder this time, and he softened into my chest, accepting that there was indeed space in me for him.
There is space in me for him. There is space in me for his brother and sisters too, and his father, and our families together and our friends and all of the people who I love and see struggle and want so badly to reach out and say the thing that might help, the only thing we both know is true when we both know that maybe it’s not ever gonna be the kind of okay again that it used to be before:
“I’m here.”
It rings true because I think there’s space in all of us, in our hearts and in our prayers and on our couches and on our shoulders and in our ears. There’s space in our arms to carry together what is too heavy to carry alone. There is room to witness, and to witness is to love, and to love is enough, or more than enough, or maybe: it’s everything.
So it’s been a long time since anyone wanted to know what my fantasy was, but if anyone asks, I have a new answer. Just be there, I would tell them. Make a little space for me.
About the Author: Liz is a mama, yogi, writer, warrior, wanderer, dreamer, doubter, and hot mess. She lives in a creaky old house in Central New York with her ever-patient husband, their four babies, and an excitable dog named Boss, and shares her stories on lizpetrone.com, Facebook & Instagram.
