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Their lives were unfolding in the way they had expected, and mine had not. My discomfort made them uncomfortable.
I am happy. And I’m really, really fucking sad.
When everything feels hard, small victories feel like huge ones.
I wish I could tell my teenage self that loving once makes you better at loving, and better at being loved. That whatever happens with each love, you can carry it all proudly.
It feels as if all unexpected life events blow in all at once, like a summer storm that drops rocks of ice on your lawn on an eighty-degree day. That’s true of the hard things: they arrive with an exclamation mark, sudden and declarative.
It is completely bonkers that after we’ve had our heart put through a meat grinder, we just gather up the chunks and say, “Well, let’s try again!”
Even if you’re surrounded by people you love, figuring out grief is a solo project.
That is what I’ve felt like all of these months, like I am groping about in the darkness, waking up in a world I hadn’t expected to occupy. But there is no way through it except through it.
That miscarriage had been the first in a Triple Crown of losses that happened so quickly one after the other I didn’t even have time to be sad about the first one.
There is no choice we can make that will help us avoid heartache or suffering or loss, in some measure.
You are twenty-two chronologically, but situations such as ours have a way of aging us, of packing the wisdom of many more decades into us very quickly.
You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to. That’s what your heart is there for.
Ernest Hemingway wrote “the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places.”
This is how I honor Aaron and my father: by making sure their deaths aren’t a black hole that sucked me in, but the spark I needed to be able to burn brighter.
It’s about facing whatever darkness looms over you: your suffering, your sorrow, your sickness, and still putting one foot in front of the other.
Yes, we have all been broken before. And yes, we could break all over again. The years will roll on. More joy. More pain. More possibility. More yes. More and.
