I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we’ve returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I’m with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small.
“Taking Care” Copyright © 2019 by Callista Buchen
Just a tiny note, tonight, to share this poem with someone else who might need it. I am slowly learning to hold the hot small hand of my grief; to welcome it when it walks into the kitchen on an otherwise unremarkable morning and sits, still and watchful, across the table as I set down my eggs. There is an odd kind of kinship in shifting to greet my grief as a friend rather than that devilish lion prowling in the night. In the past few years I’ve learned something about covenantal relationship from my closest friends, and I wonder now about covenanting with my grief: to reside with it and to allow it to reside in me, a testament to something true and innate in my being. And, of course, that truth is this: that there is love here, and grace, even in the sorrow and longing.
My Staircase Wit. 