Memories & Moments — Grateful, yet Grieving
On the side mirrors of my car, it says; “objects appear larger than they are.” It seems strange, but it’s true. My experience last week affirmed this statement to a T.
As I walked into a morning Pilates class, I expected to focus, breathe, and feel better when I left. Before the class began, a woman next to me announced she wanted to call her husband and tell him she loved him. I felt like I had been sideswiped by a semi-truck with her words. I got through the class but ached in my soul. It came from out of the blue, unexpected, and left me wanting to say, “I want to call my husband and tell him I love him, too.”
I made it through the class, and as I was going to my car, I followed behind two women and heard one of them say, “I told my husband….” Was this an emotional ambush? Really? I got in my car and said, “Lord, what was that?” I felt the pain again, like someone had smacked me where there was a 12-inch scar down the middle of me—it hurt. I was in pain. Grief ambushed me and left me trying to catch my breath.
The longing and desire to talk to my husband and our thousand conversations over the years all came into my brain. Like an Instagram reel, I went back to my life before he died. The times we talked in the car while driving came into widescreen view. My brain took me to the files I’ve collected over the years to remember moments that became memories. What was filed in the back was magnified in the experience I had in my Pilates class.
Grief comes, and then it goes. Tears come, and by allowing them, we can let them go. Grief arrives in big and overwhelming ways and, sometimes, in quieter and subdued ways. However it comes, we can allow it without disabling ourselves, remembering we loved someone, and that’s the reason we grieve. Grief will not diminish our love for our person. Love outweighs our grief.
