Delayed Reaction
When grief catches up
This Sunday, July 26th, I’ll be playing as one of the three singer-songwriters featured at Songs for the Living— a show focused on grief my Supernova Support partner and I dreamed up. We recorded eight episodes for the second season of our podcast on the subject partially to honor our shared “dead dad club” experience and also to focus on all the other flavors of loss endemic to the human condition.
We’re no experts, but like any honest, self-reflective person, we store a treasure-trove of wisdom born of the uniquely personal series of losses that color the brand of our lives. And life will generously pony up on new ones or polish lingering, unresolved issues whenever necessary.
Apparently it’s necessary the week before you do a show billed as part concert/part public grief ceremony.
I wrote a song called “Soldier’s Daughter” which hopefully hints at my inherited ability to soldier on in the face of difficulties. It’s been a blessing and curse to access the strength to function at a high level in the midst of crisis. Teaching during the pandemic and California wildfires while struggling to be an attentive mother to my foster-adopted daughter wouldn’t have been possible without it. But sooner or later grief will have its say.
Things have reached an untenable level in our home recently and we’re realizing that we may not be able to live together under the same roof. As my daughter walked out of the house carrying a mismatched load of her belongings with no clear destination after dark, I felt a crack in the soldier’s armor spread in both directions like an icy lake in a springtime thaw.
All the panic and terror I couldn’t face when she went missing a year and a half ago floated to the surface like the creature from the black lagoon. I sobbed, gasped, and repeated phrases like, “This can’t be how it ends” over and over. The slippery rope of the things I imagined I could control ripped out of my spiritual hands and into the abyss of oblivion proper to it. She ended up coming back for now, but something changed.
In an effort to keep life going and mitigate damage from the trauma hurricane whipping through our lives, I hadn’t been able to touch the tender wound of parenting someone who only experiences care as control. Any kind of structure or call to pay attention to habits and choices that actually make us feel good lands like a prison guard’s night stick. That evening last week, grief tore through my soul like an acid attack, burning away the hopes for a different outcome for all my effort and love than what’s really happening.
There’s comfort in knowing I’m not alone. I’m looking forward to this Sunday afternoon where a group of people enter an auditorium willing to drop the everything’s fine act and bravely open their hearts to a serenade of songs that find the cracks in our souls where the light gets in. We’ll laugh, probably cry and feel a lot more human at the end of it.
If you’re in the San Francisco/Bay Area, you’re invited!
Enjoy 16 pocket-sized poems bringing small but certain happiness based on merchandise from a middle-aged shopgirl’s year working at the Luminarium gift shop. “A Luminous Year,” by Karen Joy Brown.
Very good love, That was a rough one for sure.