Today’s prompt: I’m only going to give you this one direction. Read this poem, and as quickly as possible, write. Write anything and everything that comes to you, rushes through you, enters your heart and your mind. Don’t think. Just write. I always encourage that – the ‘don’t think, just write” – but this particular piece calls me to ask you again to let your own voice tell you what it knows.
Happiness grows back
Like saplings after a forest fire
Barren grief
No longer your primary
residence
That old hollowness
Carved out
Washed
With holy tears
An old topography of loss
You will follow
Back to life
I call bullshit.
Perhaps barren grief is my primary residence. That’s legit. But to the rest, I call bullshit. To say happiness grows back, that I will follow back to life, implies that I will return to the Tonya of Before. I may be able to say I’m happy at some point down the line, but I already know it’ll be a different happy, another feature in this detestable New Normal.
Cooper was not the only thing in my life that made me happy. In fact, some days he did NOT make me happy. Some days, he drove me nuts. That’s beside the point. Cooper was one of the three best things I’ve ever done; Logan and Cassidy are still here and are the other two best things I’ve ever done. Right now, I know they are in the shadows of my grief, in the darkness of their own grief, but they are my loves. They bring me joy. They make me look to the future when my grief has tied me to my past and present. Logan and Cassidy give me hope. Nolan and Madeline give me hope. The future has potential for happiness.
Here’s the thing. It will be a new and different happiness. It will be missing Future Cooper and Cooper’s future. So no, happiness won’t grow back. I will have to plant it, cultivate it, care for it. Start it from seed. My old happiness did a Humpty-Dumpty the afternoon of August 24th. There’s no fixing my old happiness.
Also, I won’t follow anything back to life. I’ll walk side-by-side with my faith and my family and my friends, but there’s no following. If I want to come back to life, to get anywhere close to who and what I was, then I have to do work. I have to be patient. I have to honor my grief and respect who I am right now if I ever want to be stronger and better, to get through a day without crying. Maybe I have to keep telling my story, even after the 30th response is written.
As depressing and angry and pessimistic as I must sound, I’m generally an optimist. Oh, 2020 tested me and 2021 isn’t doing me any favors, either. Still, I’m generally an optimist, just a realistic optimist. Will I always feel like this? My God, I hope not. Will I reach a day when I laugh easily, when I’m a more thoughtful friend, a less selfish human being? Please, God.
Logic and the experience of others say this precise pain cannot last forever, that it will change over time. It already has, but it shifted from jagged surface pain to a bowling ball in my gut pain. Deeper and heavier. Less visible but somehow worse. Eventually, it has to get better. Right?
Logic and my personal wiring combine to tell me that a positive change won’t just happen. It’ll take time, yes, but also work. Cooper lived, loved, suffered, and died. I can’t leapfrog over a broken heart and altered future. I won’t. I can’t ignore how he died and the pain that causes. I won’t. I owe it to both Cooper and myself to give this grief, this pain, however much time it needs.
Looking back at the poem prompt: Saplings grow because they were already underground. The forest fire cleared the way for new growth. My forest hasn’t burned. My forest was damaged in a terrible storm and now there are piles of brush left to rot. New life may grow from decomposition, but it’s different life, and it has to fight its way through the fallen trees.
Woods Writes 