In the Ashes

And just like that, another month has gone by since we lost Freya.

We feel her absence with every breath of the day, and the heavy tears still flow. We go through the motions of living, and with each passing week, both the subtle and overt expectations to resume “normal life” grow. James and I have both returned to work, but there is a hollowness to it all now. The work that I felt was meaningful or purposeful before is now just something I go through the motions of doing, with limited faculty for executive functioning. That may be “of the moment” and part of where we’re at in our grief, or it may be part of us now and change our life paths for how we leave our mark on this world—only time will tell, and we are giving ourselves that time before changing course. Overall though, this stasis we are stuck in hasn’t freed much space for the weight of her loss to lighten, or for much joy to seep back in. We can access it, but it’s fleeting, and fades quickly. Joy doesn’t feel right or real to me yet, but melancholy has become what feels like an old friend.

Melancholy is often seen in life as something to be avoided or “fixed,” and yet that is the state that I feel I’ve comfortably settled in, and in which I feel content to remain. That’s an uncomfortable thing for a lot of people to hear, but I think there are some who might understand it, on some level. Melancholy opens you up to something vast and allows you to sit and really reflect—or at least explore deeper aspects of life with a nonjudgmental curiosity that we often lose as we grow to adulthood. There are so many insights I’ve gained in the last nine weeks, and I’m ruminating on how to share them, but there’s an organic repellent to doing so quickly. It’s the oddest juxtaposition—to feel enlightenment and want to share it, but know the pacing purposefully needs to be slow, and that I still need time to sit with it longer before I release it.

There’s a book that has helped guide me through my feelings—The Wild Edge of Sorrow, by Francis Weller. For me, I’ve found that books on grief are necessarily meant to be slower reads, not devoured. It’s taken me two months to experience the wealth of information in this book, because I felt a longing to sit with and experience it before sharing. There are so many relatable and profound insights on grief that help it feel communal and remind us it is not meant to be experienced in isolation. Summarizing the writing feels like an injustice, but here’s my attempt nonetheless.

Grief is a time when we leave the familiar world behind. “We exist at the edge of something without shape… the identity we had known for our entire life has just been dissolved” (p 28).

This isn’t dissimilar to getting a life-altering diagnosis—like we experienced when Freya was diagnosed with leukemia. The territory of grief is intended to be heavy:

“grief invites us into a terrain that reduces us…we find it hard to meet the day, to accomplish the smallest of tasks…we feel estranged from the world… We live close to the ground, the gravity of sorrow felt deep in our bones.” (p 15).

The deepest resonance of Weller’s writing for me has been reflecting on the lost Scandinavian communal approach to mourning and grief.

“Among the ancient Scandinavian cultures, it was a common practice for those dealing with loss to spend their days alongside the fires that were aligned down the center of a longhouse. They would occupy this physical and psychic terrain until they felt they had fully moved through the underworld where grief had taken them… This sacred season in the ashes was the community’s way of acknowledging that one of their people had entered a world parallel to but separate from daily life… Little was expected of them during this time, which often lasted a year or more. The individual’s duty was to mourn, to live in the ashes of their loss, and to regard this time as holy… Whoever came back from this sojourn came back changed and deepened by this work in the ashes.” (p 16).

Grief in and of itself is a descent, and Weller astutely points out that our culture primarily values ascending, not descending.

In this descent into grief, this state of melancholy, I think I’ve accessed and unlocked a deeper well to all my emotions. I’ve envied how people I admire, like Glennon Doyle and Brené Brown, hold such powerful insights and can move others so deeply. They have a way with words that is profound and accessible. I walk away from their writing and remarks feeling like I’ve personally grown and that my understanding of people and the world is made better. I think of these wonderful, strong women as elders—not because of age, but from the wisdom they’ve gained and continue to share for the betterment of the community and future generations. There’s a deep resilience within them, too, and I think that has come from their own personal “descents” and coming out stronger on the other side. Having lost what we lost, and being in our own journey of descent, we’re finding the flames that will guide us, and Weller’s book is one of those guiding lights for me.

I’m not bold enough to put myself in the same category as my idols, but I’m using this blog to work through these feelings and find the words that can help me evolve and eventually ascend, and maybe along the way they resonate and help someone else too.

It feels inauthentic to end this post without sharing that we’ve done some joyful things—like exploring new hobbies, spending time with friends, and other soft touches that are helping to light our journey. The thing that has brought us the most joy, though, is the ability to donate $21,000 so far to amazing and deserving cancer and Down syndrome organizations in Freya’s memory. Your incredibly generous donations allowed us to do that, and that has been an invaluable gift you all have given us. I’m in the midst of writing blog posts about those organizations and that’s been bringing a lot of tears—but we want you all to know what these organizations did for Freya and our family so you can know the impact of your donations. Freya’s birthday is in a few weeks and that will be a hard day for our family. We want to find joy on that day, and one way we hope to do so is by creating memorial spaces at our local schools — where Freya found such a strong and loving community. We will share more on that soon, but there’s a well of joy building for that fundraising cause and we would love to have you join us in that effort.

My last contribution to this post is to share with you a few melancholy songs that have felt sad and soothing, but ultimately served as a healing balm to find our way back each day.

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