Unzipping

We sorted through a box of things that we're going to put up for sale.  These were items from my life with Anne and the boys.  They meant a great deal to her.  I know that I gave some of them to her, but I can't really remember which ones (I'm such a guy...).  Many of the items were connected to special times--births of sons, Christmas, birthdays, Mother's Day.

I was fine working through the list and gauging prices from the various online bids we saw.  As we got to the bottom of the box, we arrived at those items most closely connected to the boys.  

That's when the tears came for a few moments.  I zoomed right back to the feelings of their loss.  I felt for a moment responsible once again that they won't have a mom for much of their lives, that their children won't know their Grandma Annie, that they don't have her calm and steady influence in their lives.

The tears and sniffles were real.  They didn't last long.  They weren't bad.  It really does help to write this down and get some psychic distance.  And it is wonderful to be able to choose how to feel after the emotional moment has passed.  I am so wonderfully grateful for all the love and joy that those trinkets represented.  And I have such joy in the life that I have now.

It's all true at the same time.

I was reminded of a passage from Melodie Beattie's The Grief Club.

"Maybe the scars from losing someone we love are like zippers on our hearts.  We can't stay open and crying all the time.  That would hurt too much, and we wouldn't get anything else done.  So we shut off the pain.  But these emotional zippers keep us from closing our hearts too much or too long.  The waves of grief keep us open.  They let other people in and let our feelings out." (page 35)

So I unzipped that spot for a few minutes, and it was all right.  One of the things about this journey is that I don't have to unzip that spot as often as I used to do.  But I dare not sew it shut.  Beattie is quite right.  The pain and the love travel the same path in and out.  

Later Beattie describes this as the two commitments we must make in order to go on: the commitment to life and the commitment to our grief.  Those are not competing or contradictory commitments.  In fact, we travel the same road in each case.  This is the dual process understanding of grief put into non-clinical terms.  If I shut off the path to the pain that erupts still on occasion, then I will block the road from my heart to the people I love.

So unzipping the heart and shedding a few tears is worth the price.  And when I've blown my nose and wiped my eyes, then I can choose to be grateful for what we had and to rejoice in the life we have now.