Tag Archives: grieving

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Looking back at the Landslide

Ten years have passed since my father died. Ten years! Shortly after he died I wrote my first blog post. It was called, “A Landslide”.

In that post, I commented about how my Dad’s death felt like a landslide and I was suffocating under the debris.

I ended that post by considering what happens, over time, when a landslide occurs. In time, flowers push through the new earth and life returns.

It feels surprising to me that my father has been gone ten years. I don’t know how it’s possible.

I miss his physical presence. His ability to take over and take up a room. I miss his self-confidence. I miss his absolute complete amazement and appreciation of me, my husband and my kids. I miss knowing that if I ever got in a pinch all I had to do was call my Dad. He was a force to be reckoned with and that force was always on my side!

When my dad died, I poured my energy and time into my mother. It seemed like the best way to honor him and it helped ease the grief. Now they are both gone and I find this anniversary has things to reveal to me.

Ten years reveals that the loss can still make me cry. When I stop to think about it, it breaks my heart that they aren’t here.

But ten years reveals something else as well. I don’t constantly feel the physical separation their deaths caused like I used to. They have somehow become a part of me. It is as if they move and walk with me. I take them wherever I go.

Ten years ago I had hoped that life would return after the landslide. And it has. It’s a different life than before, but life is indeed present. Like the layer of the new earth that a landslide brings, both of my parent’s deaths brought new challenges into my life. A new way of living was required.

Initially, this new way of living felt heavy and unnatural. The vacuum created by the physical loss of them threatened to pull me under. Their deaths, their final act of helping me to grow, meant I had to stand on my own two feet fully and completely for the first time. I needed to learn to push through the grief each landslide brought and discover how to live without their physical presence.

A time of laying fallow was needed. Time was spent recovering from the seismic shift the landslide created.

Now, as I had hoped, new flowers are blooming. I’ve learned to stand, then walk and even dance again.

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“And even in our sleep….”

Have you ever noticed that when things happen in life…graduations, births, deaths, moving….they never seem to happen one at a time? That’s been true for me, at least.  Big life events are crowded into a small time period, often with more than one big thing happening at once.

Processing gets lost in these times. That’s where sleep comes in – assuming you can sleep. Our dreams take over when our waking days fail us. At night, when all is quiet, our thoughts are exposed while dreaming.

And so it has been for me.

I heard a quote recently, that was new to me. It spoke to this experience of pain exposing itself while we sleep.

The poet Aeschylus said, “And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

And so this season has been just that. Awake, I function.  I laugh.  I enjoy.  I work. In sleep though, that which can no longer be ignored, demands it’s own time.

In sleep, I weep.

The last three months have been so full.  My youngest daughter graduated college. I moved my mother into an assisted living and along with that I have begun the process of dealing with my childhood home. The reality of my mom being gone from my life, some day soon, rests on the horizon. One of my daughter’s will be getting married in less than a year. She will move out and begin a new life. There is plenty to keep me busy.

Looking ahead, In the fall I will begin to work three days a week. I have done two days for the last two years but three feels like a big increase. I will still be caring for my mom…still working….still planning a wedding…still running a household…still being a wife, mom, friend…you get the idea.

But honestly, during the day, I tell myself everyone has to do this kind of stuff, everyone has these experiences….it’s just life. Deal with it. And I do.

But my dreams speak to feelings too deep to express in the light of day. Sadness, weariness, and fear. And loss. Both real and imagined.

Last night’s dream found me in my parent’s house. Lately this is the new backdrop for all my dreams. Realtors were emptying out the house. I had spent two weeks right outside the house, with my mother. I did not want to go inside. But finally I did and I saw that it was almost done. Furniture was being moved out, everything was sold. And I laid down on a grassy area (yes, inside the house!) and sobbed. Curled up into myself, I couldn’t stop sobbing. Realtors tried to talk to me. They offered me already sold pieces of furniture to try and get me to stop crying. I looked at the items but I recognized none of it. I tried to find my childhood bedroom but the entire house was foreign to me. And this made me weep more. Finally, I decided I must stop crying. I stood up, wiped my eyes and left.

Last week’s dream was the same. In their house again but it was Christmas Eve. But not like I remembered Christmas Eve’s to be….this one was complicated, uncomfortable and again, involved crying.

And so it goes.

I know many go through losing parents and perhaps even childhood homes. I know they survive it. But still my heart worries….

I will learn from it. I will get through it and I’m counting on that grace from God that the poet mentioned. And I know that when my mom does die, that my waking world and my sleeping world will merge. The pain will no longer be contained within dreams.

But for now, I’m grateful for the sleeping world as it does its work at opening my heart to the wisdom and grace that change and loss produce. Even in our sleep.

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