Permeability

The sadness nearly got me this week.

That’s a lie. It did get me and it shook me. It still has me. None of it is officially my own. Some of the people I love and work closely with, people who make my life more beautiful and bearable, are suffering. People I have lost love for are suffering. People I barely know have brought, with courage and grace and unbeatable honesty, their suffering to groups that I’ve facilitated. And I’ve been absorbing it like a sponge. I’ve grown heavy from it, have sunk to a depth where it feels like the pressure is causing my insides to crumble. I don’t know how to metabolize it. It is these times, when I’m confronted, so clearly, by the limitations of what I can really do that I feel impotent in a way that is unbelievably frustrating.
My sons are facing the loss of their remaining grandfather. I told Shark, as he walked away from me this evening, dodging my embrace, an expression of love that he did not accept, that I wished I could take this from him. But I cannot. We cannot take one another’s pain, we can’t fast forward grief, we can’t do anything to reseal the cracks in the people around us. We can only be close, hold them in genuine care while they heal themselves. And when the cracks spread to us, when they awaken our own dormant sadnesses, I suppose all we can do is be still. I’m trying to be still now, to sit with the truth of my impotence, to brace myself for the next blow with buoyancy. Trying to be elastic. Because tomorrow there will be new grief.  And it might be my own.  And if it is, all that will make my work of holding myself together is the steady love of the people who feel my sadness.