Grief In Spirit

Hello my dearest readers, I know it has been a while.

I am starting off this post with some sad news. A very dear friend and role model of mine, and a brother to so many, passed away yesterday. He was the pastor of an enormous parish in Silver Spring, MD, and has no doubt saved countless souls while he was alive. He was Franciscan friar and priest and I know Sister Death welcomed him with open arms. He was my site supervisor when I was Franciscan Volunteer and we both got to know each other very well. He was one of the kindest, most thoughtful, open, and probably the most ridiculously goofy person I have ever known. It’s incredibly difficult to accept he is gone, he was not very old and he just had this personality you can’t imagine departing your life. I had asked him to be one of the priests to co-celebrate our nuptial Mass and was really hoping he’d be the one to marry us if possible. He was delighted to hear about our engagement and while it may not have ever been possible for him to marry us considering he was the pastor of an enormous parish a couple of states away, at least now we know he will truly be there in spirit. I already miss him terribly. He brought joy into everyone’s lives, he really, really did.

In a couple weeks will mark another death day that happened a long time ago and since early 2020 I had made plans to visit where two of my uncles are buried. It is hard to explain what I want from this visit.

I am tired of the exhausting heartache and conflict that feels incredibly unnecessary and almost like a burden I will have to face as soon as I get married.

I want to be a loving wife and mother who is strong and unbroken, emotionally open, mentally resistant to anxiety and depression, and let nothing as scary as death and loss stop me from living.

But I’m human, I often fit the exact opposite description I aspire to be. I am extremely susceptible to downspiraling, especially when it comes to facing personal failures.

Will facing my grandparents greatest “failures”( I mean choices they made for the “greater good” in light of their children’s deaths, failure is an extremely loaded term in this context), somehow help me face a future where I may need to face the same choices?

I sometimes pretend I am not a super sensitive being but the truth is I often can’t stop myself from crying much more often than I ever would care to admit. I have let grief become a part of my identity the moment in 4^th grade I made the connection that I was named after someone who committed suicide and the more death occurred in my life the more and more it secured itself in my identity. I took that small, but such hugely impactful piece of information, completely to heart. Names have meaning and my mother chose that name, for me, because that person meant something great to her.

Of course, in 4^th grade, my understanding of what it meant for me was a completely crazy assumption and I remember talking to my mother about it at the time and as soon as those words spilled from my mouth she pulled out the chocolate ice cream and we talked and everything was okay.

But today, I remember, my name is not exactly the name of the person I was named after. My mom changed the spelling and the pronunciation. I don’t have her name. I have my name. I am leading my own life and having my own experiences. I will and do experience failure but that does not mean I don’t learn and grow from them.

The precious life I was given that I am so afraid to waste is still ahead of me. It’s still here with me! I need to remember that living itself is not a waste. I need to remember while life is short, there is still time. God’s plan is good.