“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” ― Anne Lamott (from Homage to Age and Femininity, published in O Magazine)
Oh, to dance with a limp. In the early days, weeks and even years after a death, we hold on to hope that we will some day be healed. We hope we will be the person we were before all this happened. Before the illness. Before the accident. Before the death. Before the funeral. Before the tears and the heartbreak. Before… before…
Often a death, or other major loss, sets off a series of losses. You have to move. Your financial situation changes. There is an unfolding of loss extending over time. And in this time, often because of this loss, we change.
But, the beauty of the dance is that, if we grieve well, if we allow ourselves to feel the hurt while still attempting to navigate our new lives, in our crookedness and with our various limps, we become a new version of ourselves.
