The Year Ends Quietly and Slips Away

I've posted a few times with retrospective-ish thoughts on the progress of this last year, so I won't belabour the point. Even so, a lot has been surfacing for me the last two weeks--I guess because it's finally been a little quiet. All the stuff, the reactions, the emotions that I shoved to the back of my consciousness because I didn't have time to deal with them because we were Moving On™ have been quietly pushing themselves to the forefront and demanding their moment of attention.

So beyond the obvious of what a year of incredible accomplishment it has been, it has also been one of great sadness for me. I don't think it really hit home until I got, well, home, and my grandmother and grandfather were both glaringly absent. Especially my grandfather, because my grandmother had been so withdrawn and frail for the last 2 years of her life. But in a way, my grandmother too, because she told my father before she died that she didn't want a service. He honored her wishes, but it was hard to not have some way to ritualize saying goodbye and acknowledging the whole of her life, either. And then there was Gibson. What can I say but I my heart aches missing his sweet face and six-toed feet clicking their way through our tiny home?

There were other heartbreaks and disappointments along the way too, which I didn't get to grieve or resolve because, well, it's complicated. And I had board exams to pass and a life to pack up and plunk down in a new place. I'm just finding it hard to be fully at peace about it without at least looking at what is gone, let alone acknowledging that I had to say goodbye to some things way too soon, way before my heart was ready, way before it could accept that some things will never change or be what you want them to be no matter how much wishing and hoping you twist yourself up in doing. It helps me understand those realities intellectually, which I grasped nearly instantly, but it doesn't make me feel any less sad, and the sadness can't be gone over or under or around, only passed straight through.

This has been a year of great happiness too--I saw a 4-year project of incredible effort and endurance culminate in a master's degree and the crushing of my state and national board exams. I've met some incredible new people and reconnected with countless old ones I thought I'd never see or hear from again. I live in view of some of the most beautiful mountains and wide open skies on earth. For the first time in almost 20 years I get to see my brother nearly every day and be a part of his life. I finally found a field I love that helps people and communities heal, whether I end up going to PA school or not (Dude, I KNOW.) And all of these things are in the end separate from the sad and setback things. It is not a zero-sum game. It is possible for my heart to exult and grieve, to love and to lose at the same time. Indeed, it is the only way it has ever known how to be.

Occasionally you listen to an old song and the lyrics jump out in bold relief at you because they ring so true. Here's one from Kate Wolf sung by the incomparable Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris--which I particularly love these days because I am at a literal and figurative crossroads, looking simultaneously backward and forward. I am far enough along in life that I have a bona fide past while still having a bright and promising future, and because I am literally on a Great Divide mountainside where the rivers indeed change directions. I keep the last stanza close when the sadness and uncertainty seem intolerable and endless:

The finest hour that I have seen
Is the one that comes between
The edge of night and the break of day
It's when the darkness rolls away

All of the lyrics are here.


This second one is about the return of light after darkness, covered by Nina Simone whose styling suits my bittersweetness.


Enjoy. And gratitude to all who have made this year what it was for me, for showing me all you have shown me and taught me all you have taught me. Mahalo to you and to 2008.