After You Read

You have just read Never Enough.

I don't want to ask whether your grief looks anything like mine. I want to ask what my story made you notice.

What I Expected

I had expectations about that first anniversary. I had planned for it. I had thought about what the day should hold and how I might meet it. And then “Never Enough” reached a place in me I had not planned to visit.

You have just read what happened. What interests me now is the surprise. Grief had already given me plenty of reasons to feel uncertain, yet I still carried ideas about what would be difficult, what would be meaningful, what I should be able to handle, and even what my own response might look like.

Maybe we can't help doing some of that. We make pictures of what is coming because not knowing is hard. But reality doesn't always honor the picture.

Have you noticed that in yourself? Maybe something you dreaded wasn't as difficult as you expected, and then something ordinary—a song, a smell, a piece of mail, somebody laughing—undid you. Or perhaps the surprise wasn't grief at all. Maybe you handled something you were certain you couldn't. Maybe you wanted company and then couldn't bear it when people came. Maybe you laughed. Maybe you felt nothing when you expected to feel everything.

But there is a deeper kind of surprise—the kind that doesn't just contradict our expectations but renders them irrelevant. I spent so much time preparing for the weight of the sorrow, expecting that the primary battle would be surviving the pain. I was prepared for the storm. But in the midst of it, I was surprised by something I had not prepared for: that our love could be so present in me then.

Sarah's unplanned song brought me there. I couldn't make the sorrow large enough to prove the love was large. I didn't need to. For that moment, our love was simply there, larger than my efforts to memorialize it, larger than all that first year had piled around it to make it seem small.

When “Should” Appears

The question isn't whether any of those responses were right. The more interesting question may be: Who did you expect yourself to be?

I can see now how easily expectation can become judgment: I should be sadder. I should be stronger. I should want to talk about him. I shouldn't want to talk about him this much. I should be grateful. I shouldn't be laughing. I should be doing better by now.

The particulars will be different for each of us, but should can quietly turn an experience into a measurement of ourselves.

Sometimes the distance between what I expected and what actually happened told me something I couldn't have known beforehand. So rather than correcting the response, what if we simply notice the distance? What did you think you would feel? What actually happened? What, if anything, does the difference make you curious about?

Staying Curious

I couldn't always know beforehand what an experience would bring forward in me. Grief could surprise me with sorrow, certainly, but also with anger, strength, laughter, clarity, numbness, tenderness, even a response I didn't recognize as mine.

I began to see that I didn't have to turn every surprise into a conclusion about myself. I could notice it first.

I can be curious about what I am discovering in myself without deciding what it means.

That kind of curiosity leaves room for the experience to be what it is. It doesn't ask the surprise to become a lesson. It doesn't require me to understand why it happened. It simply leaves something open that expectation might otherwise have closed.

The Same Song

There is another part of “Never Enough” that stays with me. Sarah and I heard the same song differently. What she heard didn't make what I heard less true, and what I heard didn't require her experience to be wrong.

At the time, I didn't need a principle about holding two realities. I was simply confronted with something I hadn't seen. There was more there than I knew.

That possibility matters to me now. Not because someone else necessarily understands your life better than you do, and not because another person's interpretation should replace your own. But another way of seeing can sometimes reveal that our first view was not the only view available.

Has that happened to you? Has someone said something about your experience that made you stop—not because you immediately agreed, but because you suddenly realized there might be something else there to look at?

You don't have to decide what it means. Just notice where your attention went.

What Surprised You?

I wonder if there is something in your own experience that has disregarded your expectations: something that mattered when you thought it wouldn't, something that didn't matter when you were certain it would, a response in yourself you don't quite recognize, a moment when someone else saw something you hadn't seen, or something you dismissed because it wasn't the thing you were looking for.

Stay there for a moment, not to explain it but to look again.

Perhaps one of the first things grief can show us is not what grief is supposed to be, but how much we had already decided about ourselves before reality had its say.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

What did my story help you notice?