Resistance is a funny, familiar friend, reminding me to pick myself up and begin again – even when it feels like life just won’t stop. When life feels thick and murky, resistance rises and tells me not to share myself with the world, because “no one cares”.
So I’m dipping into this deep well of resistance. And it keeps sending me precisely where I need to be, in the uncomfortable truths, moving toward clarity.
I’m learning that I need to share my grief. I am learning that I need to surrender.
— me with my two greatest heroes.
Let me tell you about George and Joyce Ballard. Two of the greatest people I’ve ever known.
Summers were typically spent at their home in Bolt, West Virginia. It usually began with our annual 4th of July trip to W.V., and ended with me on the final day of our visit, begging my parents to let me stay for the summer. After enough tears, pleading and convincing my mom that I’d be well-behaved, my suitcase would remain unzipped, and my parents would tell my grandpa that they’d see him in several weeks when they’d meet him half way to pick me up. I had won!
The following days and weeks were spent doing a myriad of chores, but they never felt like chores to me. Weeding the garden was time spent with my grandpa, watching his leathery hands separate weeds from plants, pulling them up with ease. I always found his hands to be beautiful. I’d still be wearing my nightgown, scrounging around in the dirt for weeds and ripe tomatoes, and popping up with delight when I’d found one. I’m convinced that this is why, to this day, the smell of warm tomato leaves sends me to a place of pure, unfiltered joy. It makes me feel like I am held.
Helping my grandma clean around the house was getting to listen to her sing, typically her favorite hymn, and watch her lips curve into a soft smile while she recited the lyrics:
“And because He lives
I can face tomorrow
Because He lives
All fear is gone
Because I know
He holds the future
And life is worth the living
Just because He lives”
Her voice carried through the house, as she went back and forth from different rooms, showing me how to dust, wipe, vacuum and straighten. I’ve never known a comfort I could compare to hearing my grandma sing on a summer day, the smell of furniture polish in the air and the sun shining in through the front room windows. All was right with the world in any moment spent with her.
As I got older, I didn’t spend summers with them, but when I visited, she was always the first one awake. My grandma and I always shared a bed (no matter how old I was), and early in the morning she’d gently slip out from under the sheets and shower. I would eventually wake up, and find her with a silky, floor-length robe on, sipping coffee and reading her bible. I’d join her, and we’d sit and talk. “Tell me a story from your childhood, Grandma!” I’d ask eagerly, with a cup with more creamer than coffee in it. She’d always oblige, closing her bible and giggling to herself as she told me a story about how her sister Nellie would wet the bed and blame it on their brother Sam, or about how awful it was to walk in the snow to the outhouse in the middle of the night as a child.
My grandpa passed in February of 2011, and my grandma passed just this March. The immense feeling of loss has seemed incomprehensible at times, leaving me feeling open and raw, tender and alone. I look outside my window often, looking for my place in it all, not even noticing that I am the one weighing myself down. The rest I find in the cool evenings is rapidly exchanged in the mornings for all the grief I carry. I walk through my days, invisibly cocooned with all the wishes I have to control my life more in light of their deaths. How can I grip tighter? Sometimes I think that by keeping a tighter grip on things — my perceptions of how people should show up for me, my finances, what I have and haven’t done in my life — that I’ll be able to manage them somehow. If I keep my worries in plain sight, they won’t come true. I don’t want to feel this pain again, I don’t want to lose anything.
Yet I know that through my attempts to keep everything contained, similarly to how a mother duck herds her ducklings closer and closer, I am living in the very places I want to avoid.
Surrender means relinquishing. To wave the white flag. To give up. To exhale. A word I am learning to chose at every moment, for as every mystic, sage, rabbi and ancient text so often reminds us, we are not in control. We are stardust from centuries before, only now grounded in body. The lesson is that the more we let go, the more fluid and easeful life becomes. The deeper we surrender, the deeper lines from joy appear on our face.
I have held onto my grief like rocks, prohibiting me from being carried through the cool waters of life’s grace. Afraid to let the rocks fall, for fear that my grandma and all the love I felt from her will sink, too, never to be found again. What I am trying so hard to hold in place, may in fact be my dreams trying to come into form. I am stopping the very flow of new love. "If I can’t see her and hug her, I don’t want it” I think to myself.
But I want to give you a new type of love, my grandma says to me from the stars. Let me love you in a new way. I haven’t gone anywhere. Promise.
The more I’ve surrendered, the more I’ve felt her near. I haven’t tried to talk to her, because I’ve felt that in talking to the expansive space between me and the ether in search of my grandma will just further confirm that she’s dead. But the Universe just keeps guiding me back, touching my shoulder the second I turn away and saying She’s here. Why won’t you listen?
In surrendering, we are asked to trust the birthing process. Fear is of no use in these moments, however trusting is of supreme importance.
While we are authors by birthright, co-creating with our lives just like all the people who have come before us, we are also at life’s mercy. How do we learn to realize that life IS in our favor? Even when hot tears become the only sensation our faces feel?
It doesn’t mean that we give up entirely in the face of grief. It means we simply let go of the hold it has on our bodies. We see what is coming forward and remain focused with intention, committed to the release of stress and the birth of love.
Can you sit with me, for a moment? Yes, you the reader. Can you sink into life, into the earth, and feel how it loves you? As I do so now, I become radically present to the life living within my skin, the life that now carries the blessed memories of my grandparents. In this realization, I see that my life is now the example of all the good they did, all the love they shared.
Every day, I am learning to let one of the rocks in my hands be carried away in the current, and with each rock a little bit of the pain goes away, but to my delight…the love remains. The tension I carry begins to release and my breaths become fuller and more pleasureful. The places of tension is where I hold secret fears, that I am not supported. That I’ve been forgotten. That life does not love me. That I am failing.
I see how these fears do not serve me. So I let go of the rocks and I watch them join the other pains and heartaches I’ve let go of.
Peace is trying to hold us, in every moment. Let it. Where are the tense places in your life? Where do you clench, grip and tighten? Allow yourself to be held by the waters around you. This is surrender, this is beauty, this is love.
When I wake up tomorrow, when I feel the grief begin to settle in, I will sink not into the expired and yet still sacred love of how my grandmother loved me during her earthly time, but step boldly into this new love. A cosmic, forever love that is always present to me. I will ask her to tell me stories. I hope I can hear her giggle.