dear hilary: the shape of your grief

This one, friends, doesn't have a letter in front of it. This one, since Preston told me to write the hard thing, is the letter just for me.

Dear Hilary,

It is always weeks after you think it will arrive that grief finally, politely, knocks on your door. It isn't in the moment you make the bed in the house that is emptied or bake dozens of cookies and do the dishes over, and over, worrying that there won't be enough bowls when the rest of the mourners arrive. It isn't when you finally lie on the bed at home after the flights, after the funeral, after the tears you knew would come when you realize your engagement ring is the exact color of the suit she was buried in, or when your brothers cry next to you, or when you spend an hour playing around the world in basketball in the concrete driveway even though you can't move past the first place, because you don't really know how to play basketball.

But one afternoon, a weekend, when you've done the errands and dropped off the dry cleaning, when you've had tea and coffee and not worried about the whipped cream you put in the coffee, when you're settled adding street names and numbers to a spreadsheet for your wedding, and you suddenly realize it: everything she never saw.

You didn't show her the binder you made, the colors of your bridesmaid dresses or the way your dress fits you, just right. You didn't show her the ring, in person, you didn't exclaim the way he holds your hand or how much he loves to cook for you - and you know she would tell you you are lucky and you and your mom, you don't deserve these men who cook for you. She didn't know that he makes you laugh, even at yourself, or the way you look in a picture together, or your plans for five children, and how your mother thinks it'll be all boys.

And you will sit, binder in hand, on your bed and realize with a start that you are getting married and you can't give her a corsage and you can't hug her and you can't take a picture with her, with all the women in all their wedding jewelry all together, those pinterest pictures everyone tags can never be yours.

The shape of grief is ever-moving, the heart is the hammer that molds it, beat by beat, the well-loved driftwood on a beach after winter, shaped by the movement of wave after wave, slowly sanded smooth, gentle, even. 

This is the shape of your grief, Hilary: an absence physical as presence, while you bake cookies and organize flights and make the world move in the right times and places, the grief waits for you. It waits for your heartto hammer it smooth again, beat by beat.

The shape of your grief: softening, still.

Love,
hilary

when I hate long-distance

This morning all I feel is the ache of distance.I wake up to it in the bed with me, this familiar stranger of being apart from the person I love. I hear the fan blowing the already-fall wind across the room, rustling the papers I haven't put away. I look around with a wide-eyed wild hope that maybe I'm back where he is, or where he is is downstairs with a Sharpie pen and a journal and a prayer book and his Bible, and when I walk down the stairs he'll smile up at me from behind his glasses in the way that I have traced over and over, an inked tattoo in my heart of that first look, that realization of how he must see me, how maybe I must be beautiful because he has that look on his face.The ache walks me in and out of Starbucks, through my trouble choosing music in the car, in my half-hearted greeting to God at the right turn by the brick house I used to love. The ache is somewhere in my ribcage, but it moves. The ache is somewhere behind my heart, and it anchors.I wrote once that it is beautiful. Our selves, strong in our breathing, in our standing, can soften our hearts and our eyes past the miles. We still find each other. We still sit down, unwrap our days to the quiet hum of our computer fans.And it is agonizing.And it is peaceful.And it is terrible.I hear the words of others about how the distance is good, how it builds something good, how the time is something to be cherished. I hold a paper plate in the lobby and stare at her blankly, feel my feet on the stones in the floor, tell myself that I should soften my heart. But for all the words about how distance stretches and grows us, I want the words for how it also aches in places you didn't know you had, how I close my eyes at my desk and I think about him and I think about me and I see the miles that move between us, and the ache lives somewhere behind my heart.I don't want the words that the time will go by fast, that it will move, that this will be something that I miss and wish I could get back. I don't want the words that all this purposes together for good (oh, I know it does, I say that to myself), but maybe I want the words that just know it is an anchored ache behind the heart, and that it is so much better to be near to each other, that the laundry on Saturday days, that the order Chinese and eat it on the porch watching Netflix days, that the days when you walk through a field in a sundress holding hands days, that those days are so good and lovely that the ache is part of how you know how good it is.But it is a hard way to know that. And it would be better, will be better, just to be in the field together.What was the poem?Your absence has gone through melike thread through a needle.Everything I do is stitched with its color. - "Separation," W.S. MerwinThe anchored ache behind my heart.It will be better to be together.love,hilary