Where do you go when the loss comes?
Loss has come to all of us in one way or another. The loss of relationship. The loss of hope. The loss of career. The loss of faith. The loss of what you were promised this life would look like. Loss is an inevitable part of the human experience.
I wonder, what have you lost? And what does that lostness feel like within you? Does it have a feeling?
I remember a friend once telling me of the loss of her daughter when her daughter was only a few years old and how it had ripped her world apart and how she still carries around such absence. My own parents, before I was born, had lost two children, twins, born one after the other, and both died only hours later. It is not something we talked about growing up. Too heavy. I shall never forget the phone call to tell me that my high-school sweetheart, only a few months before her wedding, had suddenly and inexplicably died in the night. I was a wedding photographer back then, had three weddings to shoot that very week. The camera was the heaviest it had ever been.
My friend who lost her daughter told me of walking the rocky beaches on the windswept shores of The Holy Island of Lindisfarne in the North of England. And how she would reach down and pick up the ocean-worn sea-glass, and there was something in the smoothness of the ground-down glass that brought comfort to her grief-stricken soul. I wrote this poem right after she told me her story.
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THE WEIGHT OF THINGS UNNAMED
Where do we go when the loss comes?
When our shoulders bow under its weight?
The things that are too heavy for the naming.
Like touch unwanted. Like keeping his secret. Like blade on wrist on tiled floor. Like slamming the door. Like the drop of your stomach when you find something out. Like the drop of your stomach when you have been found out. Like the silent emptiness that fills a space once the laughter has left. Like the crippling feeling that no matter what you do it is never enough. Like the loneliness that comes after a night on social media. Like bruised eye hidden underneath dark glasses.
These things are a loss and a grieving and most often we do not have the language to speak of them.
So where do we go with them?
The unspeakable things.
Usually I run to the water. Moving water.
When nothing makes sense anymore
I turn to the ocean and to the river.
The ocean is as good a place to hide as any. To hide like grain of sand, like the smashed glass. I have found that grief is a grindstone and so too is the ocean. They break us apart. They rough away the sharp and the piercing. They smooth us out, even as we hide in their depths.
So I let myself sink under the water and stretch out my lungs beneath the spray. A surrender. The wave that breaks and turns and tosses and smooths me over. The grindstone of grief.
Some say we should turn to God in such moments of despair. And I guess this is my way of doing so. For pain, too, is a baptism. Perhaps, in the end, they are the one and the same sacrament. They are both a loss of breath and a coming home to depth. A dying, a drowning, a rising again. The ocean. God.
Enfolding my own story of that which is too heavy to name into the hands of something larger than I.
Till on the beaches is where we pick up the pieces. Sea-glass green. The ocean decides when she is finished with us. She gives us back to the world of men.
Smashed glass somehow now made smooth,
sea-glass green.
Hold it in your hand and
I know that it still doesn't make sense,
but may you no longer need it to do so.
It still hurts, it always will.
It is still heavy.
The weight of things un-named.
But somehow
may it be light enough to just
keep on walking.
Click here to hear Joel's poem in Spotify.
Written by @joelmckerrowpoet
From this week’s guest series, "Words for the Weary", with a subscription, in the App.
