Tonight I was hit by an unexpected little burst of grief. They happen from time to time, but this one seemed to hit out of nowhere, while I was minding my own business. I found myself missing my father, which is somewhat unusual in and of itself. I didn’t have a close relationship with my dad; it was always a bit uneasy, never fully comfortable. So to be missing him was unusual and I can’t exactly explain why. Perhaps in a little while I will allow myself some quiet time to allow myself to fully feel what I am feeling and perhaps come to a place of understanding the why of it. For now I can be patient with myself and give myself the space to take it all in.
I am grateful this evening for the process of letting go. Every time I experience one of these little grief bursts I realize that I am letting go, releasing a little more of the pain of the loss. It doesn’t necessarily get easy, it simply gets easier. I found myself riffling back through some boxes in my guest room closet looking for pictures from my wedding nearly 27 years ago. I realized that it is one of the few pictures I knew I had in my possession that showed me in a picture with my father. I had previously scoured all the expected places in my rooms looking for my wedding photos because I was seeking a particular picture of me with my sister Michaele (I also have very few pictures of me with her), but could not find it. Tonight, I seemed to know exactly where to go to find them, and there they were.
Going through the photographs to find the one I was looking for was itself a release of sorts. Looking through the photos (which never made it into a book, to what would have been my mother’s chagrin had she known) I saw a young version of myself I barely recognize now surrounded by equally young-looking sisters. I looked through all of them, allowing my heart to take in all of the emotion of walking back through those memories once beautiful then painful and now touching in a completely different way. I found myself once again being grateful that I hadn’t thrown away the photos as I’d been tempted to right after the divorce. I can look on them now as a deeply important time in my life; one that represented so many things to me at that time and remains significant even now. I can look at them with gratitude for the friendship that I now have with my ex-husband, from whom I have now been divorced more years than we were married, knowing that the purpose for our time together was to bring two really great beings into the world in the form of our children.
Life is so interesting. Tonight I was feeling the grief of the loss of my parents and in seeking to release a little of that pain, I search for a picture that allows me to release yet a little more. And in that search I find, once again, so many things for which I am grateful. And I smile. I’ll close with a chorus from a song I wrote called, “Letting Go.”
People come in our lives and for a while they stay. But they’re not ours to keep We let them go, we give them away. So we gotta make the best we can of each and every day.
‘Cause all too soon we know We’ll face another time of letting go. © M. T. Chamblee, 1996
