Standing on my own two feet, I guess
Since the book arrived, I have been reading each day’s meditation from Martha Whitmore Hickman’s Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief. It became a ritual. I would write to A in my journal, read the meditation for the next day, and then go to bed. It’s really an excellent little book, and it’s given me a lot of comfort. After I’d read every page for a year, I started at the beginning again. I found that during the second round, different mediations spoke to me than those that touched me the first time through, and I assumed that meant I must have moved forward and my perspective was different.
It occurred to me today that I haven’t opened that book in awhile. It had entirely slipped my mind. When I pulled it off the shelf tonight, the bookmark was on June 23rd, so my ritual, so habitually kept for almost 2 years, has gone by the wayside for almost 2 weeks now. I didn’t even notice, and am not sure why the thought sprang into mind today.
I suppose one has no need to wear water wings if there’s no chance she’s going to drown. This healing business sneaks up on you; that has been its one consistent feature. One day I look up and realize that I’ve stopped doing some kind of habit or ritual, one that I felt was saving my life at some point, or started doing again something that in my grief I gave up. And often, I’ve realized it’s happened without my even noticing until it’s been happening for awhile. We seem to possess some kind of deep knowing that recognizes when we no longer need something, and lets it go subtly, quietly, and without a press release, bypassing all of the angst and struggle we engage in when our minds decide we should be doing this or that in terms of our grief work. It’s really a much more organic process, this kind of letting go. And it surprises me that my own processes should be such a mystery to me. But I suppose it’s true that we’re never aware that we’re growing while we do it; we only realize it when we look back.