The light and dark

A friend of mine is celebrating her grandmother’s birthday today. Her grandmother has already passed on to the other side but she remembered her fondly and wrote that she hoped her grandmother was proud of her.
And I thought how strange it is that when it is all said and done, the thing we long for is to be accepted and loved in a way that means all the mistakes and mess-ups don’t matter. That the love is just there, very bright and present. So bright and present in-fact that it pays no heed to the shadows and helps us dismiss them as well.
Does one ever find the love of a grandmother ever again? The constant presence who was full of candy and cigarettes and a wry word. I miss my grandmother every day so severely, sometimes it is jarring. And then I must right myself with these words “This is the way it goes, no one is immune to this.”
Life does not spare us the heartache of losing what we love. Grandparents, parents, siblings, dogs, friends. And also careers, relationships, dreams, childhood.
Mackenzie told me the other day that we seemed, in this moment, to be living out lives like we’ve peeked over the edge of the map and found there was nothing there. Just blackness. Just darkness. And now that we know we can never unknow and that changes everything.
She is right in someways. Life will never be those deep autumn days when Halloween was coming or the calmness of summer. The excitement of Christmas. The newness of spring. Now we can have all those things and we have to stop and mark them. Stop and say ‘thank you’ stop and say ‘aha! wow!’
And perhaps that is better. To see it and feel it and be able to stop and notice, track it.
It’s a new map. And maybe we are in the dark, but all it takes is a little bit of love to brighten it right back up-one glowing step at a time.
And that certainly is something to be proud of. Right, Mom-Mom?