A few days ago I met up with a friend who is in the throws of grief. She has been blogging about  the experience of living after her two elementary school daughters went to heaven.  When I stopped by she hugged me like I’ve never been hugged before. We talked like waterfalls of truth crashing into each other. Technically the transcript was of catching up… so you have left Italy.. oh so you are doing a fundraiser.. oh so how is your puppy? …. how’s work?  Mother’s day was so hard.. yes, me to, for different reasons….

But every single moment was this intense raw truth. Our hearts were both open and the intensity of our lives was right there cracking through the surface.  There was none of the posturing and emptiness of small talk.

She said something that stuck with me, “Clare, a friend just told me that I am grieving publicly and that doing so, in the current world,  is a rare rare thing.”

It is indeed.  I get privacy and we all grieve in our own way. But I think it somehow is a good thing, like fresh air, to have someone saying to their community — this is my truth. This is what I am going through. This is how you help and how you make it accidentally harder. Here is where the joy and goodness lies in my unbelievably hard days.  I am not strong nor amazing, I am just finding my way through some incredibly hard days.  Sit with me.

She is making some people uncomfortable.  She is meeting with her daughters classes.  There is some, um, variety in how well this is being received from totally embraced to  tolerated with great reluctance.  Some school staff feels like it crosses into religion in school.  But I remember when a fellow schoolmate went home sick and died of an aneurysm we were both terrified that it was going to happen to us and rather confused about  how to process this sudden person-sized hole in our community.  No one really told us about dealing with loss as a process.  No one talked about how there are things you can actively do and other things you have to just passively let happen.  No one taught us how to support the others who felt that gap more deeply, like her brothers.

My friend is having her daughters’ friends and classmates make love rocks by attaching fabric hearts to rocks and the giving them to people as an act of love and passing on rocks you receive to others. Oh how I wish when I was a kid that someone would have answered our questions and modelled different ways of grieving and whatever the verb is for supporting people who are grieving.

My home town is like a community wide Easter Egg hunt now.  Love rocks are being found in grocery stores, on doorsteps, in mailboxes, on gravestone markers, and being handed to each other face to face.  I asked a dear friend what her son in the ICU wanted… he wanted rocks to pass out to the nurses.  He wasn’t yet well enough to smile for his parents, but the smallest glimmer appeared at the corner of his mouth when he handed over a rock to his nurse.

But I also had another realization.  My friend was saying how rare grieving in public currently is.  But I realize for the past 8 years I have been grieving and witnesses and trying to support people in this little community of people touched by infertility.  We have grieved together.  This is our normal.  Many of us are hardly public about it in real life, but I feel like through your words I have learned so much about this process.  How the months blend into years. How words can sooth.  How silently being present makes a difference.  How we all get through this -somehow.

Because of all of your stories, I am no longer afraid of the grief.  It doesn’t have the power to terrify me.  Yes, it sweeps me under some days. It made me apart for some months.  It probably has made me physically at times and certainly contributed to me dropping a few balls at work and at home.   I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.. but I am not afraid of it either.

No doubt this journey has pierced me to the core. But I know this thing called grief so much better from having seen it up close and far away, from so many angles and through so many view points.  So thank you.  I truly believe our little community here has also helped me to be able to stand in the face of enormous grief in others and see the worry on the faces and in the hearts of friends and community member without flinching, without trying to fix it, without trying to make it go away.  I couldn’t have done that 10 years ago… but after watching everyone here share our stories for so many years, I can stand on my friends porch and listen to anything she wants to say. Her truth can not scare me.  Because I know she and I and so many of my friends will walk similar roads. We will hurt. But we will be okay.

We are not strong or amazing or worthy of “I just don’t know how you do it, I could never endure that”. We were those things before and after and of course during.

For me, I find the awe and strength when I see people stand up and being present for each other when they are being asked by circumstance to endure heartache.  Thank you for helping me becoming able to do that.   And thank you all for helping me on this journey these past 7 years.