I needed to befriend resiliency. My love/hate – ok, mostly hate-filled relationship with the “r” word, is a battle Royale. It’s kind of legendary, even. Oh, how I have long railed, rallied and ranted against it. Just saying it out loud kind of leaves me with a bad taste. Maybe I have defined it wrong? Or perhaps it had, in the end, defined me. And that felt wrong. And then, right. So, here you have it. My open letter opus. To resiliency and beyond.
Against all odds, something miraculous keeps us going when we grieve. It took me a long time to learn just what that was – and is. I think it has a lot to do with you.
We have had a toxic friendship and familiarity. We need each other. We’ve known each other through the thin and thick of it. We have had highs and lows and can’t seem to ditch one another. To be honest, I can’t live without you. You are the friend everyone loves to love at the table – and a pain in the ass to keep inviting back.
Or rather, HAVING to invite back.
You began to make yourself known when I was a young gymnast. Practice meant falling off the balance beam, slipping from the high bar, and landing on my bum routinely, out of a back tuck and handspring– only to get up and try again. And again. Bumped, bruised, but determined, I invited you to the team. I wanted to grow and get stronger and to know you better. I never knew your name, but there you were.
If I am honest, I have always longed for the opportunity to choose you rather than have you forced upon me. It is what makes you so complex and complicated. And if I must—okay, special.
But there you were again when Mom and Dad got divorced. We were just expected to go with the new flow. In fourth grade, we were the first to have folks that divorced. Dad would live near his ad agency in New York City, and we would stay in the burbs of idyllic Middletown, NJ. It was what was deemed best for us in the mid-70s. I will never forget it was a Thursday night when they told us they were separating. I know this because I was on the front stoop of 26 Wallace Road studying for the Friday spelling test when I was called in to hear the news.
It was delivered gently but in a matter-of-fact way that told me, “Be good, get 100, and all will be well.” I never really got to move through the sad. I equated you with strength over the bendiness and flexibility of my past. This feeling had grief attached, and it was different. But, too, it helped the muscle grow.
You see, I became a hope dealer at a young age. You know, the “if I can do it, so can you” kind of cheerleader. See me over here on the other side of hard stuff, sharing shortcuts and secret codes. Some days, it felt like holding an Olympic heavy-weight bar over my head; other days, you just came along for the ride. Side saddle. Elegant. Easy.
When my Mom Ellen died suddenly at 50, I was just 27. I’d just lost the most important person in my world, and the world kept spinning without her. I was asked to invite you. Again. I had a public relations firm to run. I allowed you to run the show when nobody mentioned grief or grieving. I returned to work two weeks later.
You are strong like her. I heard this OVER and OVER, ad nauseam. These compliments made me feel as if I was doing it right. I was winning business and coordinating fashion week shows without missing a detail – all the while missing Mom like a limb had been lost. I still did not know your game.
We moved away from New York, allowing me to sell my firm. Secretly, it felt like a relief. Like I could put down the very large bag full of weights I was dragging around daily. Guess who followed me here with you? Yep, grief. Without distraction and finding myself pregnant in a new city far from home, I was besotted with longing. How could I be a mother without my own? Simultaneously, I also pivoted careers and became a reporter for The Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, and WGN-TV! The new girl was a force – making a name for herself with shop owners and community leaders and covering the best of the best. I had my own column called Window Shopping and a television spot each Thursday morning. Mom would be so proud.
For the very first time, though, I sought the help of a therapist. It was here I learned so very many ways I had side-stepped the holy hell of grieving. How when your beloved healthy Mom is here one fine day and has an aneurysm in a beach chair on a day off – it may, in fact, require help.
Even if my outside looked ok to the world at large–I was dying inside, and winning “best actress in a drama” was no reward. The therapist had lost her Mom. I kept meeting strangers who did, too, like the one online at the Treasure Island checkout. “My Mom loved tomato soup”. I heard her past tense, “loved,” and we held up the line in our long and memorable exchange. We were not alone. It felt like a point for you. We were buoyed. I imagine my Mom is with every mother of every motherless daughter I meet.
I have grown accustomed to acknowledging her guidance and signs—like the ladybug that came in through the car window when we stopped for Carvel that one winter. The one that showed up on my 50th could be ZERO coincidence. It seems Mom would have liked to show up as a cluster of Loveliness that is a ladybug gang. At least daily, I see 444 on the clock, the number of the address that provoked the move from NY to Chicago. I feel her near, close, here.
Look. I have always (and still) had a middle finger kind of relationship with you. Having to be and wanting to grow forward from the hard stuff life deals you never feels like a choice. It is somehow hoisted upon you, and you can drown with the leaded anchor, get pulled under, or fight the current and muscle through. Forward. A synchronized swim, if you will.
For me, the balance lies in taking many steps back to move many forward. On my way ahead, I have learned and earned meaning, power, truth, collapse, empathy, and hope. It is a bittersweetness that lives within me—soft but also ferocious.
My life’s laundry list of hard stuff is long. I’ve endured countless Infertility challenges and three miscarriages between my girls. The youngest showed up on her own one day without the help of any docs or magic potions. I survived my own divorce after 17 years of marriage without saying a bad word about their Dad. Well, mostly, never. I dated for the first time at 40. Learning to get my groove back, and I even made one date a chance to negotiate two tv’s for the price of one before dinner.
Health issues have plagued us again and again – and here we are. Advocacy when we discovered Dad’s mild cognitive impairment. Ten plus years of caretaking as dementia progresses. By his side in hospital, healing and all life’s dealings. Anorexia, diabetes…tests of will, worry – and yes, YOU.
The stakes have been high – and griefy! Some days, I am unsure how I am standing, seeing it all there like that in black and white. Each and every one of these life altering challenges and changes has made us somehow closer.
I always had hope. There was an innate and intuitive knowing that I could not name, but in helping others, I learned I had crafted my own relationship with resilience.
If I could offer you some advice here, do not grieve alone! In the vulnerability of sharing, there is a wisdom exchange that will buoy you.
I am a grief specialist now, sharing decades of earned wisdom. And many trainings later, the truest is this: sharing with another when you have walked through a difficult storm, telling your story, and making it a bit easier for them to walk through the same door.
Lighter. Brighter. With you and resiliency by their side.
Are you ready to share your story of RESILIENCE? You can do that HERE.