There was this lingering feeling in my eyes and a heaviness in my chest all week. I wanted to cry, but my mind just wasn’t letting it happen. I guess that’s what they mean when they say “holding it together.” I knew what I needed. I had to listen to my grief song.
I made that up – the grief song thing. It’s that song that will make you cry. I love music for its ability to stir emotions. Music is powerful in that way – digging deep into our psychology to replay memories and thoughts that shape who we are. I’ve never replayed a podcast that made me feel like that.
My song this week was “Nobody Knows” by the Lumineers. The first few lines of the song go like this:
Nobody knows how to say goodbye
It seems so easy until you try
Then the moment passes you by
Nobody knows how to say goodbye
The first time I heard that song was in a crowded auditorium celebrating the life of my friend Jim after a sudden heart attack left his community in shock. Again when one of my best friends lost her Dad. Now today after weeks of processing the loss of my grandmother.
I have started and stopped writing this letter a million times. Grief just isn’t so simple to summarize or fit in some paragraph. It’s not easy to talk about losing the “I would not be where I am without you” people – whether their contributions were good or bad in our lives.
I still haven’t found the perfect words, but I did find a story that summed my grief up. It was written by a girl that grew up with a Mom who sold drugs. When she was 8, she met Dave. He was one of her mother’s “customers” and he was told to watch the young girl. In their first conversation, Dave asked her if she knew what a haiku was. She did. She wrote one in school earlier that week.
From that day on, Dave told her she was the smartest person he knew and made sure she had a ride to class every day. He became someone she could rely on. He became family. Dave died recently and she said, “I’m going to be weird for awhile.”
I might be weird forever. I know I’ll never be quite the same. If you’re feeling weird too, that’s ok. I didn’t come here with advice for you. Nobody knows how to say goodbye. But I hope your grief song can bring you relief and that your people can make space for you to just be weird for awhile.