Home is where your grief is
and bearing witness to the march of time
Writer and fellow Substack neighbor,
shares:To bear witness to our grief is to confront it head-on, to acknowledge its existence and its impact on our lives. To bear witness to our grief is to realize that it is trapped love entangled in our soul. To bear witness to our grief is an invitation to explore the depths of our emotions rather than bury them beneath layers of our brokenness. -
This article found its way into my inbox like an angel blowing kisses in my direction (goodness, how I love
).It surprised me with its poignancy as writers on this lovely platform often do.
Every time I visit home (Wisconsin, I’m an Eastern Tennessean now) after the recent death of my father, I am reminded of these words. It’s strange the power that words can have. The way they linger. Reminding us of our humanness.
This week, too, with the odd convergence of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, is ripe with meaning. Begging for contemplation. I love what
shared recently:This week points us to vulnerability:
To love another is to be vulnerable to hurt.
To be human is to be vulnerable to death.
Yeah, we have some emo vibes this week.
Traveling home, grief is a shadow that follows me or a frozen mist that covers everything in its icy stillness.
I’m reminded that home is where my loved ones are…yet when they are no longer here, like my dad now, part of my home is in death. Just like the bitterness of this ashy week: dust to dust.
The back deck of my childhood home.
As author Henri Nouwen says in Discernment:
Time points beyond itself and begins to speak to us of God.
Being home now is witnessing aging parents, little deaths with every slowing step.
It is remembering and confronting and battling the demons of my childhood, the longings, the regrets.
It is smiling as I think about the progression of time and what happens as we learn and grow, experience pain and joys—how we blossom into our fullness as our hands become our mothers, rising veins like tributaries.
Home now is being reminded of my own death: of youth and rebirth into these middle years in all of their furrowed fullness. Graying surprises. Joys all their own. Creaking joints.
My favorite picture of me (age 14) and my dad that I did not know existed prior to his death in September 2023. I also did not know that it was his favorite, too.
I am now the parent.
The person who has lived life.
The person who is living and who knows things (though what I know shifts, too, into humbling unknowing the older I get).
My children will one day grow into my place. They will grieve me.
They will bow their heads and feel the fingertip brush ash across their foreheads and they will think about the carousel we are riding.
Like wild green shoots budding from all of this death that brings life. The paradox of this wild, beautiful life.
*
When I visit the childhood home I grew up in, there is a fullness in every space. My dad’s arm chair. Where he leaned in the kitchen, into the oak butcher block that my grandfather built. The place at the dining room table where varnish is fading from years of numbers and notes and business.
Death brings emptiness, vacancy, but there is also an unexplained fullness. As if my dad is everywhere now. Everything he was, part of everything that is.
One week before my dad died.
I sat in his favorite room and could feel his presence. In my mind's eye, looking to be about my age and smiling.
Then, coming into the kitchen and the chair he always sat in. Again, empty. Again, full.
*
Grief follows you like a stray and hungry cat. Wanting more. Asking for things. Needing love, needing tending.
I keep being reminded of our last visit. You, even then, felt so far away, dad. Quiet. Waiting. Looking back, I think you knew.
Sometimes if I’m not careful, I’ll let grief take me with it. Into rolling winter hills. Long walks. Stories from back when. Asking questions of myself like why didn’t I ask more questions? Why didn’t I get to know your aging thoughts? Swimming through ashes.
I remember when I was in college and you, dad, came to see me in the city, and took me to Applebee’s. Talked about God. I got to know you as a man and not just a father.
I got to know how it is obvious we have the same blood. The same drive: Build things. Help people. Use life up until it dries us out. Get every last drop from it.
Those times gave me a portrait of the psychologist as a young man – and you were all things to me. You were myself in my twenties: questioning, longing, consumed by the spiritual, consumed by the why of life, tormented by silent traumas.
*
As you got older, you told me what a strange thing it is to look in the mirror and see the progression of time. Always feeling 35, but the reflection back breaking the spell.
Where you are now, I wonder about time. I wonder about home. I wonder about love.
Yet, for all of my questions, I know: Across the rolling fields and hills, each curve in the highway, a route I’ve taken a thousand times. I could close my eyes and travel back home, from home, to you and away from you. Then back again.
Do you carry memories this week of your loved ones like I do of my dad? I’ve love to hear from you.
As in life and recovery, grief can be shared. So can love. Thank you for listening.