I guess grief gives me writers’ block. This is what happened after the Summer of Loss in 2020. Not as many beloveds died this past summer… but enough for me to withdraw inward. I appreciate understanding this about how I grieve, and having learned to allow me to grieve in whatever way it shows up, whenever and however. My grief is a slow burn. I have always handled things pretty well in the moment, generally rising to the occasion to provide whatever is called for: presence, calm, comfort, strength, courage, bandages… and then collapsing into myself for awhile.

When I was a child, my father had a wood shop in the basement. Several kinds of electric saws, shelves of tools. He built things, including a lot of frames for my mother’s and my brother’s paintings; and a beautiful little pine coffin for Mittens, my cat who died of an early diagnosed case of feline leukemia when I was eleven. A couple of times he cut himself pretty badly. The first time, he came up the stairs and called into the living room where I was watching TV with mom, “Pooh, can you help me with something for a minute?” I was daddy’s little helper in so many ways. When he needed extra hands in the shop, when he shopped for groceries, when his glasses needed cleaning, when he needed another bourbon and water and didn’t want to get up from his recliner. So no one (i.e. mom) thought twice when he asked me to help him for a minute.

I followed him down the hall into the master bedroom and into the bathroom, where he asked me to get the bandaids and removed the wadded paper towels from his finger, sliced open and bleeding hard. I rose to that occasion, and helped staunch the bleeding with pressure, then doctored with tincture of benzoin and bandaged with gauze and adhesive tape. It was way too much for a bandaid. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said. After he was tidied up and settled down with his bourbon, I curled up in a still ball on the couch beside my mother, and never said a word. The second time either.

When people died in 2020 I was strong. When people died this summer I was strong for those closer to the dying. Strong enough afterward even to say that I was struggling. I’m done struggling now. I’ve settled into loss the way that I do, with a lot of curling up still and breathing. But maybe the curling up still and breathing is also the way I handle apprehension. Big change is coming to my little world next month with major surgery and months of recovery. Also, breathing is harder and my oxygen level is consistently considerably lower than optimal. More and more, I ponder the likelihood that I will have to leave my beloved home, the trees I so dearly love, and move to a lower elevation. All this is great practice in letting go of attachment: to people and to place.

So while I am curling up and breathing, I am also resting in uncertainty, in mortality, in gratitude for this precious human life that has offered me so much adventure and beauty, joy and love and opportunity to grow. I’m doing my best to allow myself to appreciate the full range of human experience, without wishing for anything beyond my control to be different than it is: practicing accepting life on its own terms, and death too. Right now that involves a lot of curling up still and breathing, simply being, when I’m not doing something else.