Life has been hard. There. I said it. If you read that with a pouty, breathy, pitiful tone, well, that’s what I was afraid of. It’s not a lament as much as it is a statement.

Life has been hard… for months. As I mentioned last week, we still found lighter moments, happiness, and fun. Amid difficult times, laughter is often the only lifeboat you can find.

But I have also been in much heavier places. I resist saying negative or bad emotions because I no longer know if I believe in those labels. 

Grief and sadness have sharp edges. They cut you in a million different ways. Sometimes, it’s death by a thousand papercuts, and other times, it feels more akin to one precise, deep puncture.

Graphic, I know.

But grief and sadness have also shown me the depth to which I am and can be connected to another person – in ways I never fully grasped. It’s called the ties that bind for a reason. We are bound to one another in invisible and yet powerful ways. In snapshot memories and heartstring pulls. Tied together in a way that even death seems incapable of severing. 

Over these many months, we have spent time with grief, sadness, loss, and despair. And often, those emotions are just barely hidden from our faces, just a whisper away from cracking our voices or spilling over the lashes of our eyes.

Lowi and I have spent countless phone calls asking in one form or another: is this just our life now? Have we entered a valley of our life tinged with loss and hardship? 

We aren’t special. We know God isn’t punishing us, no matter what those Westboro Baptists say…

We are living a human life, and sometimes it sucks a little. In the span of about 4 months this year, our aunt and my father-in-law died. Grief is messy. And I don’t know where one ends and the other begins. They run into each other like watercolors. All mixed up. What was once pink and blue bleed into each other, making an odd purple. I don’t know what I feel some days other than heavy and burdened.

The tears well up and spill out. It seems that is the last natural resource that will never run dry. Here I sit begrudgingly with it all. Trying to make sense of it. Hoping that when I get to the other side I will have healed up the more tender parts and made peace with them. I think about making peace the way people talk about forgiveness. It’s not the condoning or approval; it’s the acceptance that lands without a fight anymore. The resistance is gone. The truth of what remains rests easier inside somehow.

These experiences have changed us and changed our perspective. What once seemed crucial has softened, and other things have fallen off the radar altogether. It’s part of what made returning to the blog difficult. When we thought we had a handle on our new approach, there was a shift. Not to mention, creativity requires inner capacity and spaciousness for it to breathe. For many weeks, we felt neither.

All this loss has impressed upon me that the trite little phrase “life is short” is infinitely accurate. 

Sigh

I hate it when bland phrases end up being true. It’s like an ode to the unimaginative.

If I give myself an excellent card, this game is half over. Good God, I hope I’ve learned enough to course-correct as needed.

Life has been challenging, but it’s also been revealing.

What’s slowly coming into focus, I think, is that I am seeing the whole of life. I’m able to let more of it come into view. As terrible as loss can feel, it is a part of life. But it’s one we want to close our eyes to often.

Heartbreak is part of life, too, and it’s not what I always thought. I reserved heartbreak for breakups of romantic relationships. But I have been heartbroken and bereft this year, and my marriage is still fully intact. Loss feels like heartbreak. I never realized it until now, but it’s the only way I can describe it.

At the same time, I was shocked that this is how life and being alive can feel.

And yet, if I can feel it, it must be a part of being human. It must be OK. This feeling won’t ruin me forever. It won’t be or feel like this forever. And it hasn’t. I have laid in bed with rushing tears, wondering how deep this can run.

But the next day, I awakened to a text message that brought a giggle.

The heartbreak doesn’t stay forever. Right now, it comes and goes. It relents. It ebbs and flows.

The sadness sometimes comes with laughter at the remembering. It’s chaotic. Maybe even undignified the way emotions run over you and each other. So much so that you cannot recall if you started laughing and began crying or the other way around. 

Is this what cage fighting is like?

All of that and much more has left us here…

What now?

What do we do now that we know life in a more full, real, raw form?

Do we pack it in and coast our way in?

Do we armor up?

Do we stop rescuing dogs, cats, and ferrets because we know we will outlive them?

Do we stop letting people close because when we lose them, it feels like this?

Do we stop living?

Do we start pulling back/protecting our hearts?

Do we shut down?

I don’t know. This human life will wreck you. Some days, I think, yes, pulling back is the answer.

But then I remembered my mother-in-law years ago telling the story of how she met her husband. She went to a dance, engaged to another man, and left knowing that my father-in-law, instead, was THE ONE. When asked how long she had been married just before his death, she said, “All my life.”

I don’t know. Seems like a ride that’s worth taking. Even when you know how it will end, in the same way, it will end for us all.

In late July, my husband returned from spending a week in Florida with his siblings, Mom and Dad. He was able to be there with his family for his Dad’s final days.

When he came home, I couldn’t help but look at him and think I would someday be in my mother-in-law’s shoes. Will I wish I had done it differently? Would I give back all the years and spare myself the grief?

I imagine it’s the kind of pain that takes your breath away, that threatens to overtake you. Love feels like that, too, sometimes, doesn’t it?

Life has been challenging in part because I am finding that I have been considering half the movie screen for a while now. I didn’t see the whole picture.

Maybe when we zoom out, we can see it all more clearly. 

Life is hard, but that’s only part of the movie.

We are acutely aware that we have a finite amount of time in this life, which will never feel like enough. But we fall asleep to this truth all the time. And we want to live this life well. We don’t want to waste it. We know you don’t either.

Part of the new vision for this endeavor is to help each other stay awake to this truth. It will help us to make meaningful choices, stop putting things off, and avoid fooling ourselves into believing we have enough time. We don’t. Let’s live it for ourselves but also for those we have lost.