Growing Joy Around Grief

Rebekkah would have been 28 today, April 7. The dogwoods are in bloom, just like the day we walked beneath a celebratory rain of white petaled confetti into the hospital where she was born a short time later. For 15 years the dogwoods reminded me of the undeserving gift I received that Tuesday before Easter. She was perfect in every way, even though she was born with challenges. Her big blue eyes searched our faces from the NICU incubator as we waited for her lungs to heal enough to come home. We faced each day knowing it was a gift, knowing her life had purpose.

On the Friday after Easter in 2013, the dogwood petals took on a darker meaning. The soft, white petals looped in the breeze across the parking lot as we made our way into a different hospital where my daughter, two days shy of her 15th birthday, lay silent after failed resuscitation. The blooms signaled eminent sadness each spring afterward. I didn’t care that the blooms were the Christian symbol of resurrection, the four petals representing the cross of crucifixion, their red tinged edges that of Christ’s blood, and the center a thorn of crowns. For many years, the blooms symbolized my pain and suffering, and I couldn’t find the beauty in a single dogwood tree.

Time does not heal, but it does soften reality. I teach a Writing Through Grief and Trauma class at OLLI@UGA, and I talk about how grief impacts us, how we become traumatized by the moment our loss occurs, and how we can use writing and other tools to help us think about loss and traumatic events in a different way. One perspective by grief counselor Dr. Lois Tonkin has changed the way many of us see grief. Our grief doesn’t get smaller, rather our life grows around it, if we let it.

It’s the “letting” part that provides the healing, if we also allow the time for it to grow. This has helped me process the grief so that I can focus on the positive through writing, and I’m grateful to share my story and the tools that helped me with those who need them.

Recently, I’ve been reading through all the stories I’ve written about Bekkah over the years, most of them for my eyes only. They have been difficult to re-read because they’ve resurrected a lot of old feelings about the last years of her life. I struggled to separate the grief from the trauma, and not just from her death, but from the tangled, cyclonic marriage into which I brought her as an 8-year-old and that ended the day she died. I found it difficult to write her story without including the anger that surrounded our lives.

My heart has now healed to the point that I can now reflect on these stories and separate sorrow from pain. Joy has grown around my grief. I am looking forward to putting some polish on Bekkah’s collective story that honors an incredibly smart, vivacious, and loving child that I had the pleasure of birthing and raising. Her stories are heartfelt and funny, introspective and whimsical, and they deserve to be shared. She is still a gift to me, and her life is worth remembering and celebrating for the love and joy she spread in this world.

Happy birthday, baby girl!