"Precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke

This blog, quite accidentally, turned into a blog about grief.


Sometimes I try to write exactly why that is, or what the point of writing about it is, or just get my arms around a loss quite as confounding as a divorce. I find myself-still-when I tell people that I’m divorced feeling like I want to somehow convey that I took my marriage vows very seriously, but also that I’m a much healthier, much happier person divorced than I was particularly at the end of my marriage. Why I stress over this, I don’t know-it’s beyond silly.

"We must trust in what is difficult.”

I have found myself recently trying to explain why this time of solitude, this time of falling into a sadness that had, to my mind, no conceivable end, why that is the ultimate grace of grief?

Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t trade it. I wouldn’t, if I could somehow reverse time, do anything differently. Being still was important. Not knowing the ending is important (as hard as that remains for me). Being alone is important.

Learning to be alone has been the biggest grace of all. Going to football games and sitting by myself, going out to dinner by myself, to the movies and shopping and all the things that I dreaded to do alone for some reason-I can’t quite remember why that seemed scary to me 3ish years ago but it did.

"I believe that that love remains so strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.”

I’m not quite eloquent enough to state this in the way I want to, but my point is this: grief is a gift of grace. And it doesn’t seem like it at all, and it only seems sad and lonely. But, for me anyway, figuring out who I am when you strip away all that I defined myself as, it’s such ultimate joy.

I honestly intend to pivot the blog into a new space-and I always worry when it’s this sort of piece that insists itself to be written that I am again only seeming like that sad, lonely girl when I promise, I am anything but-but I want to give this a voice. I want my little corner of the universe to be stamped with this truth, always-holding the pieces of something that you loved is sad. It just is. But it’s also the beginning of who you get to become.

Ultimately, I grieved not only Nick and the loss of our family, but the loss of who Joy was as a wife. Taking the time to sit inside of that empty space and just let it live-it’s hard. But the reward of figuring out, well, okay, if I’m not that Joy, then who the heck am I? It’s worth it.

“Love consists of this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”


*Quotes from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke