I don’t go looking for grief, but I’ve loved and lost too many times for it not to know my soul’s permanent address.
Sometimes I can feel it coming. I tingle when I know when it’s in my neighborhood, when it’s turned the corner onto my street. I’m ready for it before it announces itself by knocking on my door.
Other times it launches a sneak attack, and I don’t know it’s arrived until it kicks the door in.
But once it’s at my home, we have an agreement. I am to dissolve myself and pour myself into its cracks, to live and breathe as grief for as long as it decides to stay.
Why? Because somewhere along the way I was given one order.
Be Lived.
And I said, “Yes. Yes, I will.”
And nothing holds me more to my word than grief.
I know joy and delight and wonder and awe and I am so grateful that I know how to dance to their tunes.
But it’s grief, with its voice like crashing glass, that reminds me most - this is living.
Here. Now. This is alive and you are life.
So I keep to our agreement because once grief is gone and I’ve reformed myself, I always notice how much clearer I hear the music.
(For a spoken word version of this piece, visit my Instagram)