Friday night, after spending the evening in Los Angeles with friends, I got sucker punched by a cold. I’ve been pushing hard the last few weeks, working to get Picking Up the Pieces out, switching the website over, planning a celebration for the 1^st anniversary of Ben’s death, being mama, wife and caretaker of my own heart and soul.  I have never launched something so deeply connected to my core, and the steepness of the learning curve has my heart pounding. I’m feeling sucked into old habits – long to-do lists that don’t get completed, staying awake late into the night when I know I need sleep, feeling dissatisfied with myself for what I’ve yet to accomplish instead of glowing with pride at all I’ve done.

My head and heart are facing off, the taskmaster and the compassionate lover.  Build Momentum! No, take care of yourself. Work harder! Work longer! Work smarter! Breathe. Rest. It will all be okay.

My head tells stories about how hard things are, and how I should be doing them the right way and wonders when I’m going to earn the big bucks.

My heart asks me to play, to dance, to meditate, to remember that there is time. It reminds me that I love what I’m doing and that anything is possible.

I’ve got a big week ahead, full of things that will pull my focus away from this space. I can feel the pressure of that, the fear of both success and failure standing squarely in my way. Wisps of the way life used to be swirl around me and my eyes cloud, my forehead creases into its permanently deep lines. I find myself losing touch with the present moment, with the simple joys. I think of Ben, of how his death has changed me and I vow to choose lightness and joy. I vow to live in trust that I am where I need to be, right now. I vow to honor the pain in my heart, smoothing it away with love and acceptance. I take steps:

 

I book a massage.

I crawl into bed before midnight.

I dance.

I step outside into the sunlight, stretch and walk to the ocean.

I ask for help.

I cry.

I put my smart phone down and walk away.

I laugh.

I write something that lights me up inside. Something that no one else will ever see.

I put the to-do list away and ask myself what I can do today that will make me feel better.

I make salsa with the heirloom tomatoes from my garden.

I pray.

 

And the lightness comes. The joy is easier to find. Love makes its way to my front door.

 

And you? What are you doing for your heart today?

Today you’ll find me back over at Kristin Noelle’s wonderful site, Trust Tending. The theme this month is Sexuality, a topic that most of us find it difficult to be open about. There have been some heart- and eye-opening stories. Tracey Todd introduces us to the discovery inherent in disability and sexuality, Ev’Yan shines brilliant light on the devastation of a first sexual experience, and Kristin deepens the conversation with her thoughts, gentle questions and amazing sketches. As of 12pm PST, you’ll find my addition to the mix, tracing the path of an early unwanted touch through my life.

I invite you to take a deep, healing breath and join us.

We live in the third house from the beach. It’s a small two-story, though bigger than our last home. The second floor is one large room with toys, a cardboard house, a craft table, my Pilates reformer and walls covered in Ada’s artwork. The French doors at one end open onto a sliver of a balcony and peering past the two huge homes in front of us, we can see the ocean.  Those two homes used to be tiny beach cottages, summer time play space for families coming up from Los Angeles with their young kids. The woman who lives closest to us moved in year-round 18 years ago and is now in her 80’s, her husband long gone, with a brown and white spaniel and full-time home care for company. She loves the sound of our daughter’s voice and the little garden we’ve put in the back yard. Her sons visit occasionally – one more than the other. She keeps mostly to herself, occasionally walking up the lane to her 90 year-old friend’s house. They’ve known each other since girl-hood and are sharing the ends of their lives now too.

The house directly on the beach is a sharply angled concrete beauty with huge expanses of glass. We watched it being built last summer as we walked up and down the sand, on the days between the broken leg and bed rest. We wondered about the owners when we moved in, seeing them only occasionally from a distance: gray hair in a wetsuit, heading toward the ocean for a swim. Over the last months, we’ve met them and are slowly developing a neighborly friendship. They are our parents’ age, though he still works in Los Angeles. They’ve owned the beach house more than three decades and finally, when the sand piled so high they no longer had a view of the ocean, they rebuilt. Their sons grown with no grandchildren in sight, she stopped me the other day to offer solid oak twin bed frames, well loved and well taken care of. She invited me in to see the house and I promised to come back, with husband and child in tow.

As we wandered through their home, admiring its clean lines and light-filled space, conversation turned to life, and work, and children. Ada had fallen on their stairs and while she nursed an apple juice and held ice to a bumped leg, we talked about motherhood. I mentioned Ben. I am accustomed to different reactions when I talk about him.  I didn’t notice anything unusual about hers, and the subject turned quickly to other things. We were leaving the next day for Colorado and were behind in our packing, so our visit ended shortly afterward.

We’d been back a few days and I was in the garage getting laundry, my hair wet from a late shower, when I heard a voice call my name over the fence. She peeked in, a bag of fresh vegetables from their garden in hand. After a moment of polite conversation, she began to apologize. She told me they had lost a child too and she’d been stunned into silence when I mentioned Benjamin. Only she’d lost him as a teenager, not an infant, a boy rounding the corner to becoming a man. As we spoke, I could feel one wall go down and another go up – the bond of losing a child tying us together while the desire to stay composed with a virtual stranger held us in check.

Every time I hear the story of someone’s grief, my heart opens wider. There is sadness, yes, and a massive amount of love. For all of us. For the beauty and striving of the human spirit. We do what we can to survive.

I recently learned that Patti Digh, a woman whose creative work has been shaped in many ways by loss and whose book Life is a Verb I recommend as a resource in the Picking Up the Pieces guide, is writing a new book called The Geography of Loss. She’s asking the question, “For what or for whom do you grieve?” You can read the stories already there and add your own if you wish. Let’s deepen the conversation. Let’s crack our hearts wide-open and let love in. Let’s change the way grief is talked about – or not talked about – in our culture.

It is time.

I have been awed and humbled by the last three days. By the way everything fell apart and came back together. By the love, support and kind words. By the gratitude I feel for my son, my support system, my friends and everyone who has taken a few moments to download the Picking Up the Pieces guide, talk about it on Facebook and Twitter, or leave a comment on the blog. It is a privilege and a joy to be alive, to be doing this work, to be finding my way.

I keep thinking about how ten years from now I will look back and recognize this time in my life as a turning point. I’ve gone from living partly in shadow, to floundering in darkness, to dancing in the light. I can feel the joy of it all radiating from my core. I’m still exhausted, still prone to tears, the ache in my chest comes and goes. I will miss my son every day for the rest of my life and I will be forever grateful for who I’ve become because of him.

When sad, be really sad, sink into sadness. What else can you do? Sadness is needed. It is very relaxing, a dark night that surrounds you. Fall asleep into it. Accept it, and you will see that the moment you accept sadness, it starts becoming beautiful. – Osho