Love in a Box

Two months. So long to be living and breathing without Angie, yet not nearly long enough for healing to begin. The hurt still feels new and foreign. I have not made friends with it yet. Sometimes I see it coming and turn away, hoping it won’t notice me. I can hide from it in busyness and crowds, but as soon as I’m alone, there it is.

It comes to me in music as I drive (Carolyn Arends’ We’ve Been Waiting for You, a beautiful song-story of birth & death). In something I want to call Angie about but can’t (“OMG, I finally found that Siggi’s pumpkin spice yogurt you were raving about!”). As I’m planning Tate’s birthday party with my sisters and Angie’s closest friends (when he’ll turn six, and she won’t be there).

This wound still needs tending. The cards and calls have trickled off, but still they come—often with unexpected surprises in them and always just when I need them the most. Like the care package, filled with all my favorite things and aptly labeled Love in a Box, that my friend Jenn sent me this past weekend. And copies of my favorite sister picture (used in this blog post) that arrived from Karen Sachar the same day.

When I begin to lose sight of what life without Angie could look like, they remind me. When grief draws outlines of this new life and asks me to color them in, it is love that helps me pick up the crayons. Left to my own devices, I would waffle between the drab color (too depressing) and the bright ones (too cheery). I might choose not to draw at all because nothing these days is just right. That is true. But lots of things are still worth picking up.

Therein lies the paradox. How to live into the sadness while also living into the joy. Not cry or be present to life’s beauty but cry and be present to it. I found myself in this space a few nights ago during a thunderstorm when I was tearfully marveling at the soothing, hypnotic quality of the rain from my candlelit bathtub. In the safe warmth of the tub, I gave myself in equal parts to the joy of the present moment and the grief of what will never be again. It was not a happy place, but it was a true place.

And from truth comes serenity. And—eventually—happiness. I’ve found myself returning to the Gandhi quote, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.” I have to believe if I keep embodying my truth—trying to live in harmony even with the disparate feelings inside me—the happiness will come back.

For my sake, and for Angie’s, I can’t let the love I feel for her stay in that box with her ashes. That’s not the kind of “love in a box” she would have wanted. I have to repackage it and find ways to send it out into the world. So today, while I cry, I will try to be that love for those who are here—for my kids, my husband, my mom & dad, my sisters and friends. And—how easily I forget—for myself.

I am acutely aware of how precious our time here is. That it really can be over in an instant. What a shame it would be to miss all the joys of this brief earthly experience. To fail to give myself fully to those I share it with. To miss the life that is because I am, ironically, consumed by the memory of one who did give herself fully to life and love every single day of her 42 years.

Go tell someone you love them. Better yet, show them. Be the love that someone in your life needs today, even if it means stepping outside the box you are so comfortable in.