Beauty & The Grief

Day 1167.

I had a treatment today with the extraordinary Lynne Rae.

She is the only person who can tame and guide my system to dissuade the threatened palsy to the left side of my face.

Yes, I know, much has been done to my body.

My heart has been coaxed to beat fully.

My chest has been eased to allow my breath.

My nervous system has been soothed to let me out of my house and chip away at my PTSD.

And I can not leave it unwritten that the ponies in the wilderness were no small contribution.

But Lynne is the final straw, the icing on the cake, the one who really nailed the numbness, the tension, the palsy-apparent.

Lynne has come to healing through adversity. She too, is in a new soul, an altered soul, a freed soul.

She speaks of intent. She relays how she tames her fear in order to keep her cancer from taking her, uglifying her. I consider how I work at the very same with my grief.

Grief can be uglifying, it can twist you, it can make you angry, unforgiving, bitter.

It can be beautifying too.

It can break your heart and crack it wide open, for grief is born from love.

Grief is love and I grieve Luke as hard as I loved him, love him.

As I travel to visit one of the team that created beauty at Luke’s London funeral, I think of all the beauty in those funerals, memorials, whatever the fuck they were.

Beauty in flowers.

Beauty in the moss, fresh from the Swedish forest floors.

Beauty in music, in song.

Beauty in acts of kindness, they flew to our sides and held us tight. They were so many.

How hard they helped us, those who were so sad themselves, in so many and varied ways. They dared to come close, they dared to open their own broken hearts, to envelope ours.

This is the undeniable beauty in my grief.

So in considering whether to embrace or deny my grief, I feel I must acknowledge that unlike fear or anger, grief is, in my case, a beauty, a manifestation not only of my loss, but more triumphantly, my love

…and celebration of my newly formed courage and capacity to love Luke, George, Adam, ......anyone.