The Parachute

I grew up a devoted church goer. My denomination was the Church of Pop Culture. The esteemed and charismatic leader? Oprah. She led worship every afternoon at 4 o’clock and I rarely missed. I so ordered my life as to be in attendance with millions of other followers as she imparted wisdom and knowledge and universal spiritual truths over the airwaves into my home.

One of the most profound and lasting lessons that I learned from Oprah was that I had the power to shape my own destiny. Whatever I wanted, I just needed to say it out loud and it would all be mine.

Getting Up

Last week I told you about a discussion I had many years ago with my book club about the mother of the main character in the book The Thirteenth Tale. She'd lost a child and was bedridden with grief even years later. This left her surviving child essentially motherless. My book club was indignant. Their basic response, what kind of mother does that?

Well, I did…for a time. When my son Jay died I was overwhelmed with grief and unwilling to get up and do anything even though I had two surviving children. You can read more about that here.

Awakening

Several years ago my book club and I read The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Such a crazy good book with many dark and captivating twists and turns. The first comes early in the story when we learn that the main character, Margaret, was once a conjoined twin. After surgery to separate her from her sister, her twin died and their mother sunk into a deep deep depression that left her permanently bedridden.

Of all the goodness this book had to offer, this detail of the overwrought and disabled mom prompted the most heated discussion among my group. Most were in agreement -- she was a terrible terrible mother. How could she abandon her surviving child and indulge a depression over the loss of another?

Divergence

I've been thinking a lot about the experience of grief and how it can be described to someone who has never been there. I’ve tried to find an illustration that captures the totality of my journey (at least so far). There’s no shortage of them available on the internet – one, of a spiral stairway. Another, of shipwreck ruins in the middle of the sea. These images resonated to some degree with me but didn’t quite tell the whole story. I keep seeing the image of a much anticipated trip with an unexpected detour to the state of grief.  So I thought I’d share it with you. You might find it helpful for yourself or for someone else who is facing a tragic loss.