The Grief I Carry
No one told me that I would spend so much of my life grieving. When I was a girl, the deaths that I encountered were loved ones and grief was something that I knew the weight of through the shield of my parents. They carried grief and while I knew it could be heavy, it wasn’t mine. As I grew into a woman, death crept closer and I began to collect my own pebbles of loss. Now that I companion the dying in my community, the losses are accumulating. Each person I walk alongside throughout their dying process remains embedded, the intimacy of the journey we shared shapes me and they truly live on in my memory.
I grieve the beautiful souls that have died. I grieve the families that I joined, just for a while, to witness their loved one’s dying process. I grieve what our society has lost by fragmenting care and shuttering away the dying and those who care for them. I carry anticipatory grief, as my heart creeps closer to a client, I can see the break ahead. And I grieve the fact that the most beautiful thing about my heart: its unflinching willingness to open despite the ache it will endure, is seen as unnecessary in the world I live in.
I made this post today because I want every person following my journey to know that I am always grieving. I am constantly knee deep in the waters of loss. I’m remembering those I’ve held, those I’ve washed, those whose children I’ve hugged through our tears. My grief is a process and I don’t expect to ever move fully through it because my work means I always have a friend who is dying and I always have a friend who is grieving and I always have a friend who is struggling through the exhaustion of caregiving.
To be a death worker is to be a lifelong griever. It is to constantly open your heart - again and again - to see what grief will teach you about yourself and your world and your God. To be a death midwife is to allow grief to break you open, on repeat, so you can shed the calloused skin and show up raw and real for the next family that calls upon you. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
