When the Season Doesn’t Change
Grief is a forever season because it is a forever love I carry for my son.
I think my daughter Clare must have asked me five times when I would be putting up our fall decorations. I felt so tired and heavy. I just couldn't get my act together. And I love fall – it is my favorite season, and not just because my birthday is in November. Back to school, a fresh start, crisp cool air. I love living in a temperate state where we really experience all four seasons. We have new beginnings every few months and a new experience of weather and nature and clothing. Eventually, I found the energy to drag the totes upstairs and bring the fall season into our home. Light the Apple Cider Yankee Candle. Wash and iron the fall placemats. Fill a centerpiece with gourds and leaves and mini-pumpkins. It normally brings me such joy.
I was struggling. Our son John Paul Raphael had died in January of that year. He was born in winter. I had done this change of season as a grieving mother twice before – winter to spring, spring to summer… But that fall seemed different. Instead of feeling like the weight of grief had lightened over the last 38 weeks, it felt like it was settling in. Pressing down. I was doing well enough to force myself to go through the motions and put out the pumpkins and the leaf garland. But it was all empty for me. False. Time marching on. The pages of the calendar turning.
The seasons were changing, but my season of grief was still here.
And the hard truth that I was learning is that I didn’t think that would change. Yes, the weather or the storms or the temperature of this unique season would shift and ebb and flow, but the main lesson I had learned almost ten months into my journey is that grief does not leave. The weight of it stays. It is a forever season. Because it is a forever love I carry for my son.
It is this reality about grief that presses so hard on me right now – the length of it. That my husband and I will carry this grief for John Paul Raphael until we die. There was no way to put it down. No way to get a break from it. All methods of numbing it or dulling it were unhealthy and self-sabotaging. It was just there, a forever season that reminded me of the Elmo’s Christmas video my kids used to watch where Elmo wished for it to be Christmas every day. Boy, that Christmas tree and garland didn’t look so fresh after 38 weeks. Sure, the weight of the grief can makes me stumble sometimes, but it is the length of it right now that leaves me breathless. Decades stretched ahead of me feeling this way, or some similar version of it. And I don’t really want to escape it – I know deep in my heart the sadness and grief are just the love without the beloved. The transitive verb without the direct object. And never ever would I go back to a life where John Paul Raphael himself had not existed. But I am so, so tired inside.
I know deep in my heart that sadness and grief are just the love without the beloved.
That season of grief was challenged not just by the passing of time but by the arrival of a season of joy – two of our daughters got engaged. This presented another new hurdle: the desire to be present and live joy and excitement and celebrate with them and their fiancé’s while still hunched with the weight of sorrow. The snaky whispers of shame swirled around me saying – really? You are STILL so sad? It’s been 8 months or 9 months or 10 months??? You aren’t OVER this yet? Why are you making this such a big DEAL????
No one said this to me of course, but in my moments of weakness and emotional fatigue I sometimes landed there myself. When I did, I wrapped my own arms around my heart and reminded myself of truths that sprung from self-compassion. I gave myself permission to just be in this season. To still be so sad. To still need so much space and breath to grieve. To be in a season of joy on a Sunday and spend the day in bed crying on Monday. To be excited to teach Religious Ed and lead my bible study and go the gym every day and still be frozen with disorientation as I stared blankly in the grocery store or couldn’t face the fall decorations or wept because it is 2:43 pm on a Friday, the hour and day he died. It didn’t have to make sense. It was all one big messy season and I didn’t know when it was going to change.
Death and life so beautifully close.
Blankie was still my comfort. The soft blue plush blanket that held John Paul Raphael every moment of his life was still my companion as I slept and at mass and in the car and often as I went into stores or to lunch with friends. I judged myself for this sometimes – how long are you really going to carry that around?? hissed the snotty, bossy other part of me, the part that can still sometimes care what other people think. But I shushed her and held blankie tighter. This too was a season—needing the physical comfort of this blanket in my arms, the smell of sandalwood cologne sprayed freshly onto the soft blue cloth every few days. Something to hold and carry when I cannot have him for whom my heart longs.
I can tell that, even if this season of grief hasn’t changed, and likely won’t, I myself am changing around it. Shifting, softening here, strengthening there, making space to hold the weight of it all within me and still move forward with the mission and plan the Lord has for my life and for the life and death of my son.
Happy Fall, y’all.
