I’m here in a long goodbye, one that might not end but I might just hold as I grow and the world grows with me.
Meghan O’Rourke captures it beautifully:
“The loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.”
“The way C’s accent turned abandoned into abundant got me thinking about whether abandonment can be an opportunity as well as a loss…The paradoxical wealth that comes with emptiness. I suppose that Buddhists would understand this, would say, “Ofcourse”… Somewhere in my loss was the opportunity to create, not unlike the way artists in Detriot were reinhabiting dead buildings and laboriously reconceiving them.”
I don’t feel any hope or pleasure. I only have a glimpse into the possibility of seeing myself as the tree growing around a painful obstruction, never leaving it but growing around and with it.