Healing

 "The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new." 

--Socrates

I feel like we're starting to build the new, people. Don't tell Grief-who-often-comes-along-with-a-surprise-diagnosis this, but Healing has moved into our home and I am inviting him to stay. Sadness, I am kind of over you. I know you might have to visit every once in awhile, like in the form of endless disability paperwork or discouraging comments on an otherwise great article about Down Syndrome, but this home just isn't right for you. We're more of a healing-happy-grateful type of home. So there. LEAVE.

That said, this walk through grief has been illuminating. In a weird way, I am glad I have experienced it. And while our grief may seem silly when parents are grieving the loss of their children or spouses are grieving the loss of their best friends, one thing I have learned is that you can't judge another's grief. You can't get OVER grief; you have to walk right through it. People all around us are walking through all sorts of grief, and I am convinced now that loving them through it means loving them through it. Healing is painful. Someone told me this week to think of grief like open-heart surgery: after the surgery, many different therapists arrive to lead you through exercises that can be very painful...but they heal.  And you'll always have the scar from the surgery, but with time and love and support, your heart will beat strongly again. One day at a time. Keep going, friend.

"I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure." -- Wendell Berry

I did ask someone this week why I couldn't just get over this, why I continue to worry how this will affect Will, why I react so emotionally to the questions we have about Grant's health and future. This kind person smiled. "Because you love them so much. The depth of grief can mirror the depth of love." And just like that, this person freed me from the guilt I had been feeling about the grief.

I have stopped asking "Why?" Why does Grant have DS? Why us? Why anyone? Why didn't we know ahead of time? I accepted that there weren't any answers to these questions and moved on. But someone else told me this week that, like a three year old asking "Why do I have to go to bed?" we often aren't looking for answers; we're crying out in anguish because we want things to be different. We want change.

Now I am realizing that I am the one who needs to change. I need to open my heart and open my eyes, I need to move forward and build the new instead of fighting the old. I need to let go. I need to appreciate the little things knowing they turn into the big things. I need to trust that things will turn out beautifully. Just like beautiful pictures are developed from negatives in a dark room, I need to believe that in this darkness a striking picture will emerge.

Here's to doing the next right thing. Here's to holding Grant. Here's to celebrating his five ounce weight gain. Here's to reading books to my boys. Here's to hanging up their artwork and making them pancakes and really listening to them. Here's to hugging my husband. Here's to staying up late and watching a funny movie. Here's to breathing and smiling and reading and writing. Here's to filling up today with love instead of worry. Here's to feeling joy and hope and, yes, grief, deeply. Here's to living everything.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, 

without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. 

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

"Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." 

-- Emerson

"You only live once. But if you do it right, once is enough." 

--Mae West