Three years can take your baby from a freshly born, milky little mess of perfection to a twinkle-eyed preschooler who calls suitcases “soup cases.” Three years can take your hair from smooth ashy brown (which long ago took the place of your childhood blonde) to a sprouting jungle of wily, wiry grays with a mind of their own. Three years can grow a family, swing every proverbial pendulum from one extreme to the other, change a landscape, change a mind, change…everything.
When you’re sitting in fresh, raw grief, though, three years doesn’t exist. Not three years in the future, anyway. The past is infinite — maybe a gracious comfort, a complicated network of unavoidable rabbit trails — and the present is mostly a black hole. But the future? Three years from this now? It’s just not possible. The world is about to slip off its axis.
And then that first night ticks by. And the second week. And the third month, and it’s all still impossible but somehow the world is still turning and life is still…happening.
Then a year becomes one becomes two becomes three, and it turns out three years can do a lot. The same unrelenting nature of time that grows your baby into a preschooler means you keep on living a life without the person whose absence was once an impossibility. It remains impossible that they’re gone, and yet it just keeps being true.
If you’ve sat in this place too, or if you’re sitting in it now, in one way or another — missing a loved one, an old life, a previous self — you know it’s unhelpful to hear platitudes like “time heals.” When time is a fog and a blur and a trick, it cannot be counted on as a healer. But it can be counted on to keep ticking by.
Three years can do a lot, unwittingly. Babies keep being born and their little curls are so precious and their chubby cheeks are always irresistible; trees keep growing, up and out, and out and up; neighbors get puppies who make fun mischief; kids get their driver’s licenses and go off to college; your face gets a little older and a little truer if you’ll let it.
So I don’t know — time is a trick and a fog and a blur, and also: the steadiest part of the last three years has been the tick tick tick tick tick of the last three years.
*****
Today is the three year anniversary of my brother Luke’s death; it’s important to me to remember and honor the depth and intensity and impossibility of early grief.
Today was a lovely day, ordinary and unremarkable: a long wait at the clinic to get a kid’s xray reviewed and cast put on (he’s fine! everyone’s fine!), some work and some chores. And it was a special day, a feast day, a day to mark: music and food and a nature walk and ice cream, some tight hugs and teary eyes and a little extra…feeling it all.
Some snippets from today:
I don’t know who hand wrote this Jan Richardson poem for my family after Luke died, but I love it. I took this picture June 7, 2020. (Full poem is below the image.)
Blessing for the Brokenhearted
Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.
Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.
Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this—
as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,
as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,
as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.
*****
Good morning Molly. I was just sharing with Luke’s friend how 3 years feels like yesterday and forever and then I saw this beautiful post. Thought I was done crying for a bit......Love you.
I love you, Molly! As usual, thank you for sharing your heart! I’m so glad yesterday was a lovely day for you. You and your family were sure on my heart all day! Three years sure can do a lot!