Seasons of grief, part 3

Photo by Nicolas Solerieu

Living with Ghosts in the Everyday

Grief moves into the domestic, into small rituals and accidents of memory. It is there in snowflakes taped to windows, in half birthdays, in flashes of joy pierced by absence.

her half birthday

i finally took the snowflakes down,
decals i splattered all over our windows
to add signs of her, everywhere

i hung them on her birthday
as december plowed through
but when spring knocked
i could not peel them off.

something about june, though
nudged me into submission,
and i quietly scratched off the signs of wintertime

but without my realizing it
i shed the house of those reminders on her half birthday
and now i feel sad and guilty
and unsure what to do about these nice clean walls

i take a drive to pick up henry and james from daycare
and when i get back
i log onto Amazon Prime
and order more snowflake decals to hang across our house

a grief burst

the leaves were falling
and it was not sad!

the boys squirmed in delight
as yellow and orange and red
swarmed around their little bodies

and for half a second
all i saw was them
wrapped in joy and wonder
(it was like visiting a land i once knew)

and then the next second
i saw who was not there
and i kept smiling
but not as hard

and then i walked down the driveway
to get the mail

How do you feel the change of seasons? How do you move yourself in and out of the stuck-ness - where sometimes we want to stay forever in one place and sometimes we know we must walk down the driveway and get the mail?