Grieving and Life

Today is our first anniversary, which is as good a day as will likely ever come to recommence this blog. But I can't do that without taking a moment to note the monumental change in our life since the last entries, of course. The below paragraphs are taken from an email I wrote during the first week after Freya's passing. While more of daily life is "normal" than at the time I wrote those words, the rest of it holds true. I thought I would put it here so that those of you who are asking how we're doing won't keep hearing silence from us. We are, as ever, so grateful for your outpouring of love, support and prayers.

As for us, we are grieving; we are also rejoicing. Every day brings its own mood, but, I believe, all of it has been quite...appropriate, for lack of a better term. Freya is worth the untold grief that we feel; she is also worth the inexpressible joy we have at her existence and at her place in heaven. I think that grieving - or at least our particular grieving at this time and place and for this cause - removes the mourner from his ordinary perch that is, for most of us, quite firmly grounded on this earth, and takes him to a place somewhere between heaven and earth. Perhaps that sounds strange, since nothing about grief feels heavenly. But I think it is our grief, or perhaps our profoundly intimate connection to one of heaven's newest arrivals, or perhaps simply everyone's prayers - all of it, this period of grieving - seems to give us some sort of clarity as we attempt to glimpse into the nature of God and of heaven, a clarity that I don't expect will last tremendously long but the lessons of which, I hope, stay with us the rest of our lives. 

Still, we flutter back and forth between that spiritual clarity, which brings peace, and joy, and I think some very real insight into the nature of our lives here on earth relative to the joy that awaits us, and life on earth. Life on earth, for its part, also has its mundane (not remotely in a pejorative sense here) elements - our friends here, our friends and family back home, cooking and eating, cleaning, going for walks, good gracious - a job interview the other day (I wonder what I said?) - and then on the other hand, this irruption of utter pain and loss into what we thought our lives were supposed to be. So even when the pendulum swings us back from the spiritual realm of contemplating God, heaven, and our darling Freya in heaven, to the earthly realm, we then must furthermore live and move between the more enduring elements of life, the life that "goes on," and this part of life that seemingly crawls or even stands still, in which the shock of losing her can hit you at any moment and pierce your soul with a pain you never wanted to even think about.