Last night I dreamed about my sister. I often do. Generally, these dreams are full of humor, and I’m a kid again in them, telling secrets to my sister and rolling my eyes with her as we react to our parents. I wake up feeling as though my sister has found a way to reach me and share a laugh even after her death.
But last night’s dream was different. Last night I found myself reliving her death in great detail. I woke up in the middle of fresh grief, and it is swirling around me today.
It has been 14 months since my sister died, 12 months since my brother-in-law died.
In the course of just a few weeks in the late summer and early fall of 2022, my husband and I both lost our only siblings.
They are the people that know us longer than anyone else. In many ways, they are the people who know us best. I still feel adrift when that childhood inside joke comes up and I can’t call or text my sister. And the loss of my brother-in-law was surprisingly equally difficult, just in a different way. For 15 years he and I we were siblings, and we became close. He could confide in me differently than he did his brother or his mom, but since we shared the same family, I could understand the nuance and context.
I view both of my sibling’s deaths as the invisible continued loss of life resulting from Covid. For my sister, it was from the undiagnosed cancer that grew within her during all those months people just didn’t regularly visit hospitals and doctors’ offices. For my brother, it was the depression, alcoholism and related consequences borne of the isolation and fear he had to experience all alone as a single adult during the pandemic. It caught up to them both in 2022. That was the year when everyone was joyfully entering back into society, and it felt particularly cruel that my family was freshly awash in new grief. I know that my family is not the only one experiencing the personal lingering grief of world events these past few years, but I also know that people are not exactly eager to talk about sadness.
It feels like there remains a heaviness over our entire world.
Right now, as I watch what feels like a never-ending stream of terrible tragedies playing out across the globe and in my own community, it feels like there remains a heaviness over our entire world. It can be hard to move forward. It can be hard to recognize the moments of joy and comfort we still have in our lives. And it can be even harder to celebrate and rejoice.
You may think that I’m about to say that you must lean into joy. But I’m not in a place to say that yet. I think that all our human feelings are worth feeling. In fact, I found that I needed time for pause. While my life kept going and I continued to have many responsibilities that simply didn’t go away, anything “extra”, including my blog and my podcast, were . . . well . . . extra. I needed time to sit with my grief, to ponder what mattered to me and to mourn my losses.
We know that our lives have different seasons, and if I could offer anything from my experience this past year, it would be to remember that there is a season for grief and for sadness. Our American culture often encourages us to push those feelings aside, and to “power through” them. But grief is a part of life. Without it we can’t appropriately experience joy. I needed some time to process, to reminisce, to mourn.
I needed to take a pause from building and growing to allow my melancholy to be felt. I’m glad I honored that. I am beginning to emerge.
Just last week a colleague I’ve worked with for over a decade paid me a compliment. It was a small moment, and a relatively benign compliment. But it was said with such feeling, and the nuance underlying it was only clear to me and that person because we have such a long experience together. I had to step away so that I could weep. It wasn’t the compliment itself that moved me, but the deep connection with my colleague that the moment made clear.
The smaller, more personal moments of connection sustain us.
I think my pause for grief this year provided me with the insight I needed to be ready to move forward again. One thing I’ve learned from this pause and from my grief: It isn’t those big moments of joy or celebration that truly fulfill us. It is those smaller, more personal moments of connection with the people in our lives that sustain us, and make all of it – the joy, the grief, the anger, the happiness – all worthwhile.
I’m ready to move forward. Maybe not with a renewed sense of hope as I’m not sure I’m there yet, but with a deeper understanding of the human experience. And for that, I am grateful.