I Wonder

A dear friend of mine posted yesterday about unexpectedly losing her mother two years ago to the day, and as I am wont to do, I started thinking and remembering.

First, again as I am wont to do, I began to berate myself for not touching base with her more over the last few weeks. I have thought of her daily, always while I was otherwise occupied, and so I tucked a note into the back folds of my mind to reach out, but I never have. I will though. I promise.

Then I began to ponder where I was two years after losing my mom. Where was I physically? More importantly, where was I emotionally?

We were living in our 35 foot fifth wheel Winnebago in Biloxi, preparing to go back to our home in North Florida. Luna, our bossy German shepherd, was keeping us straight. And I was enjoying the second place I had chosen on my traveling work adventure. The first spot was in northwest Wyoming.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, Wyoming was where I had gone to heal.

My mama loved to go. I joke that all anyone had to say was “Do you want…?” and before they could finish the sentence, she would be in the car ready for the adventure to begin. This was not quite an exaggeration. My mother guzzled life and all its wonder, and whether by nature or nurture, she left me with a similar gusto. I think our favorite phrase has always been “I wonder…” I can still see her sitting in the passenger seat, studying the landscape as it spooled by, saying “I wonder what that…?”

After she died, though, my wonder left me for a while. So did my joy, my anger, my emotions in general. I know now that I shut them all down as a way of protecting myself from the overwhelming grief that was threatening to smother me. I didn’t understand then that one cannot eliminate a single emotion in isolation, but I remember the moment that I began to understand it.

The hunny, Luna and I were driving through the Absaroka Range in northwest Wyoming, which undoubtedly is one of the most beautiful places on this earth, and although I could acknowledge that it was, the vast beauty before me inspired absolutely no emotion. I looked out that window at distant snow capped peaks behind meadows of lupine and prairie sunflower alongside a classic rushing stream. I stared out the passenger window, much like Mama had done so many times, but I had no sense of wonder. Ironically, that made me wonder. It was in that moment I believe I began to heal. It was with that question of why I felt so little awe and the realization that I had spent the previous year since Mama had died numblly stumbling from one day to the next that I began to claw my way out of that place of heavy grief. Over the following months, I spent a great deal of time and headspace gently exploring the concept of emotions, feeling them out, eventually realizing that the more I processed and gave space to the soul wrenching sorrow, the more I found myself laughing again.

By that second anniversary of losing my mother, almost a year after the gift of realization given to me by that Wyoming landscape, I was truly beginning to actively engage with life again. I was beginning to rediscover my sense of wonder.

Everyone’s journey with grief is different. Some will navigate it more quickly. Others more slowly. Had someone told me before I lost my parents that it would take me two years to even to begin to imagine a life filled with joy again, I would have believed deep down they were exaggerating. Now, though, having learned through living, I understand the truth of it.

Grief has no time limit, and one person cannot use another’s map to find his or her way to the other side of it.

I do hope my friend, though, has found her way to joy again this two years later.