Today I tell myself eight words – You are stronger than you think you are. Sometimes the loss of my mom, my best friend, is just too much. It feels too surreal, too painful, too deep to navigate. These are days I feel like I could drown in the vastness of grief, dragged down to the bottom by things left unsaid, unasked, undone while memories – simple, beautiful fragments – drift by on my way down. Grief is a deep place. Grief is an endless place. It is both like a cave in which you are forced to crawl and a wide plain across which you could run forever.
Today, it’s late on Sunday afternoon, I fall asleep on the couch. I wake to darkness both inside my house and out. This darkness infects me. I get up to pull the clothes out of the washing machine and move them into the dryer. A train roars by in the new night. Then the eight words come out of nowhere. You are stronger than you think you are. The words fill my body like air. There’s no comfort in them, no soothing or easing, but there is a knowing. It’s a knowing that I am still here. I still walk, talk, laugh even. I am still here. Sometimes that’s a miracle in itself – that a body, a heart, a spirit, a psyche can withstand a loss that shatters our sense of the world and our place in it. You are stronger than you think you are.