This is How You Heal

Arriving (M.A. Reilly, Over the Atlantic Years Ago)

I.

In the year after his death, broken from its moorings, my body no longer felt like mine.  Adrift, I felt legless. Yes, I lifted an arm to take down the tea cup. I pressed an arm against the doorway. I moved in the world with a mindlessness that kept the separate, broken parts of me together.  The limbs I once knew for 56 years propelled me into the world where I least wanted to go and where I was most desperate to escape to.

Sorrow weighs and now I see it is more anchor than burden.

II.

Three years have passed and sorrow lifts like the first rays of morning sunlight across the sea. I am home in this body again, different than I was before. But aren't we all moving to stay whole?  Isn't that the impetus in life?

Here's a truth to hold close in those early days when you most want to distance yourself from the pain of loss. Sorrow does lift and you lift it with the grace of something you could not know before.