Page 110 of Happy After All

So do I. The loss I felt, the way I grieved and am still grieving. It matters.

I feel surrounded by this wisdom, held close by it. By these different experiences of motherhood. Elise, who has her Emma. Gladys, who had loss before her son. Alice, who found joy in a different world than she’d first dreamed for herself.

This, I realize, is something I was missing.

Sitting with women and asking them how they live. How they love. In spite of everything.

Becauseof everything.

I am in awe of the fierce strength in these women.

It makes me see a strength in myself I haven’t seen before. It makes me see the real truth of what Elise and I were talking about earlier, that life is made up of pain and loss. That the happy endings happen between the unbearable.

And we keep going, until we find more happiness. However it looks.

Looking at Lydia, Gladys, and Alice is looking at loss. Of all different kinds. They’re all widows now.

I realize now I’m not simply looking at loss. I’m looking at lives well lived.

Well loved.

I look around and realize that while I tried to leave things behind, I didn’t leave everything behind. I brought the pink with me. I brought that hope.

I lost the world where I would watch my Emma grow.

My love of her, the hope of her, came to this new world with me.

Everything that’s ever healed me, hurt me, shaped me has come to this world with me.

When I’m a mighty oak, like Alice, I’ll be shaped by all of it.

It’s my pain, which means it’s up to me to try to decide what to do with it.

For a child that never breathed.

She changed me, and I’m glad she did.

This experience changed me. Maybe when I’m older, I’ll hold someone else’s baby with ease the way Alice did. Maybe someday I’ll hold my own like Gladys.

Maybe someday I’ll sit in this courtyard with a young woman experiencing this same loss and I’ll hold her hand and speak with the confidence of time.

What I’m certain of, for the first time since everything fell apart, is that I’ll be happy.

Truly happy. Because the lines on these women’s faces are not all from tears.

They have smiled, and they still do. After loss. After hardship.

Alice is an oak.

Because of the love in her life, but the loss in it as well. It isn’t an easy thing; it isn’t a simple thing. It is only doing the very hardest work, it is only being willing to take the next step forward when you cannotsee where it’s taking you. It’s letting your face smile again so it can make new lines that are forged by happiness and not just sorrow.

I can do that. I can.

I realize I’ve been missing something all along. I thought I left my grief behind.

I brought it with me, and I tucked it away. I kept it hidden so I could keep it safe, because I didn’t know what my life would look like without carrying my daughter in that way, but I can do it in a different way.

I can do it like Alice. Who had to let herself be changed.

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