I laid in bed with my youngest this evening quietly as tears ran down my face. She just turned two this past week. The awareness of time and the passing of time has been at the forefront of my mind. I read something a few days ago about awareness of the “last time” experiences we have with our children. This writing resonated with me because I have already been thinking about what the weaning process will look like for my youngest daughter and me (hence the quiet crying in bed this evening.) To be honest, I am always hyper-aware of endings. Sometimes I feel them coming intuitively. Sometimes I feel the weight of an ending long before it is time. Sometimes, the endings come out of nowhere, leaving me blindsided.
There can not be a talk about endings without talking about grief. Grief is the way we move through the endings. Grief is the way we process what it is like to experience something for the last time. Grief is being held up to the wall of acceptance that we can not change things that we so badly wish we could change. When talking about endings, transitions, and grief, I find it helpful to name that what we possibly struggle with most is the emptiness felt where there was once a filling, whether gradually or abruptly.
I have come to know that emptiness as some mystical pathway to parts of God that I had never known before. And even still, the pain involved with endings, transitions, and grieving keeps me like a child, hidden underneath the fig tree.
So as I lay there, not nursing my daughter, whom I have nursed to sleep every night since she was born, I felt the very present reality of the change we are in and about to walk through, but I also tapped into the more immense grief within. The one I carry with me. The one that holds the accounts of all the grief before. And inevitably, the longer I am blessed with life, the more full that list becomes.
And yet, this is the way of life.
So tonight, I grieve quietly for this change that I am in now, this ending I will have to face. I grieve for the ending that happened this week eight years ago when I suddenly lost one of my brothers, an ending I did not see coming. And then I also grieve for each of you reading, for some of your stories I know that are close to my heart, your pain that I have carried as my pain. And then there are those whose stories I do not know, but I know this, endings are universal no matter what your story looks like. We all have this in common.
I want to say and affirm that endings are hard. They are lonely. They change us. Sometimes all at once. Sometimes little by little. You are not alone, whatever journey you are walking through right now, whatever ending you are lamenting or heading towards. I encourage you to make room for grief so that it doesn’t stay in your body, so it doesn’t transfer to someone else in the family, so that you know yourself more, so that you know your God more, so that you are transformed, so that you are more compassionate, so that you see and honor the beauty and brokenness of your own humanity.
And remember this, although this is the way of life with most of the meaning and the answers to our questions, wrapped up in the mysteries of God…
There is good still to come.
I believe that the present suffering is nothing compared to what awaits us in Heaven (Romans 8:18). But do not forget, there is still time to experience heaven on earth, to taste of His goodness, kindness, gentleness, and love now. There is joy awaiting each one of us bound within the quiet moments of our days and hidden within the overlooked views of our daily sights.
To grieve any ending or transition doesn’t mean there is an absence of joy; they can coexist like most of the complexities of this life.
Above all remember, You are seen. You are heard. You are known.
Warmly,
Lillie
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