Trust in the slow work

Reconstructing life after significant loss takes so. Much. Time.

It is a peculiar stage in the grief process for me, now fully thirteen months after Claudia’s death. I find myself thinking about her nearly as often as before, but with a more settled sense of my new reality. Occasionally I am struck all over again with the immediacy of this unexpected and uninvited new life, but for the most part my new rhythms provide me solace and security.

There are now days when I simply want to be finished with this grief life. I want to be able to tuck my memories away, and with a burst of new energy rush into whatever might be next. I’m tired of this “in-between” place of recollecting the past and peering into tomorrow’s possibilities.

I’m sure that mindfulness practitioners would remind me that my most important task is to live within this moment, to focus on the day before me. After all, I cannot change the past, and I cannot ensure the future. All I really know is that I have today.

Frequently that advice is helpful for me, especially as I watch the birds at my feeder: they’re not remembering yesterday’s seed foraging, and they’re not meticulously planning for what they might find a week from now. They simply light upon the perch, tap their beaks into the seeds, tossing a few back into their mouths as they resume their flight in search of whatever is next. Birds don’t have a sense of what was or what will be; they simply live in the now. And, I have to admit, they appear to quite content in doing so.

But this advice is not always helpful to me, because like most grievers, I am torn between what I once had, what is no longer here and the mystery of what the future holds. In these moments I am learning to trust that Love’s work has more intention than I may know. When I can’t change a thing, and when I can’t force progress to occur, I can trust, allowing myself to embrace the day I do have before me.

This morning I am recalling Teilhard de Chardin’s poem (in which I have substituted my preferred “name” for God, “Love”):

Above all, trust in the slow work of [Love].
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only [Love] could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give [Love] the benefit of believing
that [her] hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

The day before me is neither odious nor exhilarating. It is simply a day to be lived in faithfulness and trust, and so I will trace again my familiar patterns, tend to the tasks at hand and see this slow work as the most my soul can harbor … for now.