Thirty-Five Years

Today

I noticed

I

was smiling

&

not thinking

about

my dead

child.

Does

that mean

I don’t

love her?

Thirty-five years is a long time to go without ever seeing my “beloved child”.  It has been always that tension between my grief and living my life.  How to honor both the living and the dead is  a never ending process of blending the two.  It has been a gradual process of choices that have built up over time, like a coral reef.  Each individual animal---or choice in my case---is small and insignificant. but the sum total is breathtaking, though invisible on the surface.  By now there is little drama left, and less and less to say.  All the building and changes are under the surface.  A reef and the human spirit are easily to shatter, but both are also resilient and tend to rebuild in changed forms.  Many other losses have occurred along the way, each with its own pain and recovery.  Nothing comes close to the up-side down, inside-out world that the death of my child wrought.

What is breathtaking is the healing