Carrying Grief and Gratitude through the End of Summer
You can’t have it all, but you can have sweetness and sorrow in abundance
When it is summer, you can have it summer and abundantly so. You can have sun-warmed cherry tomatoes eaten straight from the vine. You can have golden-headed, brown-eyed susans swaying in the warm wind and the distant buzz of your neighbor’s lawn mower mingling with the cicadas’ song.
You can have bug bites and tan lines and bare feet sticking to the humid hardwood floor as you wander from the backyard to the dining room. You can spend an unexpectedly autumnal evening under the string lights on the deck, sipping dry red wine with a friend.
You can find yourself on a white sand beach as the sun pops out on an otherwise gray, rainy day. You can get so excited for Lake Michigan white caps that you urge your friends to join you in stripping off your clothes and racing into the waves. You can have the water wash over you again and again, reminding you there are forces in this world bigger than your grief.
You can have the perfect s’more toasted over a fire that crackles orange against the luminous blue backdrop of a rare sunset over Lake Huron, which typically marks the “sunrise side” of Michigan.
You can sit shotgun in your youngest brother’s truck on the way home from your middle brother’s birthday dinner at the only bar-and-grill in “town” on the remote northern Michigan island. You can still taste the salty greasiness of deep-fried perch cheeks blended with the citrusy Oberon you’d raised for a celebratory cheers with your parents, husband, and siblings. You can joke with your middle brother that “birthday shots” take on a different meaning this year, when it’s the type delivered by syringe into the thigh of his 19-month-old son. Two weeks out from your nephew’s diabetes diagnosis, your sister-in-law said she didn’t want to think of herself as devastated because while Type 1 is chronic, it’s also manageable. You can think — but stop yourself from saying out loud — that it doesn’t look that manageable in this moment. But you can trust that it will be in time, that your brother and sister-in-law will figure it out, because they always do. You can talk about your own recent grieving, how you’re trying to allow yourself moments to give into the sadness. You can cry and cry and cry, and it still doesn’t take the edge off. And even though the pain of the loss seems to have seeped so deeply into your bones that you can’t imagine it ever lifting, you can trust that it will in time.
As the truck turns down the winding single-lane gravel road back to the cottage, you can have the bluegrass song on the stereo fill you with its wholesome nostalgic strumming. You can admire the way the evening sun glistens through the rain drops spattering the windshield.
You can cautiously let your mind wander to the thing it’s trying to avoid: Remembering that within the same 24 hours as your nephew’s cross-state, overnight ambulance ride that ushered in his new reality, you said your final good-bye to the beloved dog Randy who had been by your side for the past 10 years. You can gingerly think back on the moment of holding Randy on the floor of the vet’s office, locking eyes with your husband, and making the impossible decision to initiate the final breaths of this dog who had given his whole heart freely to you. Your uncomplicated gift. You’d given your whole heart to him in return, and you can feel it shatter as you whisper the last “I love you” into his soft floppy ear.
You can have a rainbow shimmer over the pointy green pine trees as the truck pulls into the driveway. You can head into the cottage for homemade apple crisp with ice-cream, and you can help your nephew scatter sunflower seeds across the deck for the birds. You can marvel that over the course of your 35 years, your heart has grown the capacity to hold so much grief and still have space for gratitude. You can soak in the summer abundance of being together. You can’t change the realities of loss, disease, severed relationships, and disappointment for each other, but you can find the burdens are a little easier to bear when you carry them together. You can’t have it all, but you can have this.
This piece was written with Finding Your Voice Writing Group, using the poem “You Can’t Have it All” by Barbara Ras as the prompt. If you would like to try a writing approach designed to help you tap into your authentic voice on the page, join the Finding Your Voice Writing Group waitlist to be the first to know about upcoming classes. People with any level of writing experience can grow from this writing practice.
