Living with a different kind of grief |
Grief is still pacing my floor In angry staccato steps, or slow Aimless movements place to place. I cannot sweep it out the door. This pain that does not want to let me go Denies me peace within this space. The regimented rhythm of life, from which I longed for calm and air, became in one short day cut off from all the strife set free from there loosened, adrift, untethered and away. I’m foundering. Halls I walked for years no longer are for me to walk. I do not work there any more. The traumas, crises, tears of which I talk have all gone on before. Life is so wrenchingly real behind the doors, within hospital walls. The stuff we’re made of shows. I can’t pretend to say I feel okay for leaving it behind. It calls to me. It calls from all of those the best and worst we have to give. Pain is so intimately known. Pretense is gone. The blood and guts and soul are open to be mended, to be seen and heard. You wonder how I miss the moan? The seeking to be whole is what I miss. My thoughts careen Never to be part of that again, to be there in that world of raw emotion in the ER where a world is split apart. Since November that is how it’s been, and still I am not beyond the notion that being there is vital to my heart, my worth attained there. Grief is still pacing my floor even though the garden waits outside. Joy is diminished by the thought that I am part of that life no more. My calling, where identity resides, was more who I am than it ought. Grass, why are you greener in the pasture where I cannot go? Soul, expand and open to the gift you’re given, of free time and new demeanor. Find your claimedness from God within and so accept the shift. Reclaim yourself, in grief’s own time. |