Nine months

Today it has been nine months since my father died. Like today, November 21 was also a Monday. He passed about 10:40pm. Remembering the timeframe of the experience of his slipping slipping slipping away--and then suddenly being lost forever--feels as close as my breath. Feels as quick and close to the surface as the place where my heart catches in my throat.

I know this timeframe of 9 months like I have never known another 9 months. Slammed with loss and pain and grief and also release, we have only done what we could do--make sense of the wreckage and keep moving. Sometimes we move forward, sometimes backward. But we move. We do not know this path and all it holds, we do not like this path and all it holds, but it is ours.

What I hold is a small, and at times unsteady, measure of hope that we will be delivered. Indeed, we make the road by walking. What other path is there? These 9 months have been the path of new grief--perhaps not unlike the path of pregnancy that holds and gestates a new life to come. A liminal place where the old life has gone away and the new life is yet to come. Have we become pregnant with something? grief? possibility? memory and re-membering? the hope that we can keep him with us in new ways?

There are days I want to find him, hear his voice, delight in his laughter, rest into the boundless love for me that only he could provide. But he is not to be found. Not as we knew him. So we wander, feeling small and lost, not yet fully knowing that the path is the only place we can truly call home. We must learn to find him in new ways, new places, new life.

Yes we are pregnant, yes we are walking, yes we are here and alive and have breath. May we be delivered into the place where we commune with the ones who don't.