Our Holy Dreams of Yesterday

 

 

“…our holy dreams of yesterday are gone” - Brandi Carlisle - This Time Tomorrow

Grief comes on like a dark wild storm betimes.  It either comes to me or my youngest daughter.  Then she tells me, or shares what triggers it, and we are off to the dark races again.  No matter the problems she had, we had with her, she was my sweet adopted, so wanted, baby, my darling girl, my troubled teen, my unhealthy adult daughter.  There was always hope before.  All our hopes of reconciliation are gone.  We had so many but this time it will not happen. 

All our holy desires now are that she has finally found peace.  That she will openly receive all the love her brothers and sisters, her father, and I, are sending to her to lighten her way. 

Losing a child, a daughter, a sibling, an auntie, has brought us all to our knees. We look at all she brought into our life and each of us are determined to remember the good things.  We are trying to dissolve the shadows with the light of what love we always had for her.  I do not know where all her six siblings are in their grief work.  It has been awkward, right from her funeral until now.  I have not had the opportunity to sit with each of them.  I have had phone calls, texts, emails, and we have had deep and loving discussions with them.  The closest to her was my youngest daughter and my granddaughter.  I know the quote above speaks volumes for them.  I am here as a sounding board for them.  I hold my own grief close to my heart and try not to add to theirs. 

There are still people I have not seen since her death that are offering condolences.  Condolences, now, only bring the shadows back. It forces me to enter that dark place again for a time.  There is much grief work yet for me to do.  It is no longer overwhelming but it weighs heavily on my heart and soul. 

This grief is like no other.  One can lose mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, soulmates.  I have.  Each is different in their place in our hearts.  But this… this has been truly whipping storms and dark nights of the soul.  Each of us will get through this, but there will always be those moments, hours, days, that come on and force us to do the individual, personal, grief work. 

Bless us who are bent low as willows on a bank of a stream of tears because of such griefs. 

©Carol Desjarlais 9.25.23