The Rocks We Lean Into

My dearest friend, Megan, is in the process of losing her dad. To say the season has not been easy seems trite. A few short months ago she lost her older brother and her current grief I can only imagine as some sort of heartrending whiplash. I picture a knot of silly putty, slowly stretched to its limit, tiny strands of translucent pinkness waiting to silently break.

We talk often these days, sometimes on the phone but often by text as she goes through the routine of work and having-a-life while simultaneously planning for something that must feel unplannable. And she has said that these days she simply does not feel like herself, which seems fair.  We get so used to ourselves in a known context, when that context changes violently, how do you recognize the face in the mirror? The self she knew six months ago was a self with three living brothers, a healthy dad. The self she wakes up to now has lost and is losing so much.

My parents have lost parents, my mom recently so. As dear as Mamaw was to me, it strikes me that for my mother, she is now a woman living in a world with no mom and dad. To be nurtured and loved and guided for so long, and then to find that presence gone must be jarring. You were once a grandmother with a mother to share in your joys and sorrows, a mother to watch and learn from and listen to.  Now you are a grandmother, you are the one to be watched and learned from and listened to.  Not an orphan, but alone in an important way.

I love a man who lost his mom a decade ago. I can't help but wonder who he was when she was alive, and how losing her changed him. There's a steadiness tied to parents and to lose them before you become a parent yourself seems so disorienting, like a star you planned to guide your ship by goes dark.

I've never lost a parent or a sibling so my world has never shifted, turned itself upside down, reordered itself around that new truth. There have been moments of brightness and sorrow that have rearranged my Self, made me more of what I am now and less of what I once was. But those moments provided periods of transition, months of growth, and their destabilizing force was always cushioned by the comfort of parents, siblings, those rocks we lean into out of the wind.

We have no choice but to grow into our new selves. And when we lose one rock, we must find another. For those who live lives of faith, like Megan and my mom and my love, they find comfort in one rock that never shifts, never changes, never weakens. And there's beauty in that dependence, that trust, that choice to root oneself in a Truth that never leaves. I pray I'd have the courage to stand that firm. Or, if lacking in courage, the gift to be surrounded by those who've leaned on the Rock before me.