After You Read

You have just read Yes to Life.

There are moments in grief when living itself can feel complicated.

For a long time after Jeff died, much of my life had been consequential. Jeffrey needed me. His recovery required constant attention. My own body was still recovering from the accident. There were appointments, therapies, decisions and things that simply had to be done.

Then, two years after Jeff's death, I went with my brother to a beach volleyball game. People were playing. Couples were kissing. Everyone seemed to be participating in an ordinary world that had somehow continued without me. I remember sitting there feeling how far removed I was from its norms. Their lives seemed almost trivial beside the life I had been living.

I didn't yet understand how complicated it could feel to encounter ordinary life again.

As you think back over the chapter, notice what happened when life began to reach me in ways I did not expect—and how often my response was not simple.

When Living Feels Like Betrayal

The man I noticed at the volleyball game appeared again the next morning at church. I watched him laughing and talking easily with the people around him. Then a thought appeared in my mind that startled me:

If I were to marry again, it'd be someone like that.

I hadn't decided to date. I wasn't looking for another husband. I didn't even know this man's name. Still, the thought had happened. I hurried out of the room.

Later that day, sitting alone on the dock behind my parents' house, I began to understand some of what had frightened me. Moving forward felt wrong.

In the deepest parts of me, letting go of my past and my suffering seemed somehow like voiding the life I had lived with Jeff. My suffering and my love had become tangled together. I could not easily imagine loosening my hold on one without loosening my hold on the other.

Darrell was not yet the real question. Living was.

Sometimes after loss, something that would once have been ordinary can carry a meaning no one else can see. Laughing. Enjoying yourself. Becoming interested in something. Changing something in your home. Wanting something for yourself. Imagining a future you did not plan. The experience may be welcome. It may also hurt.

Notice

Has anything that felt like living also felt disloyal?

Stay with whatever came to mind. You do not have to decide what the feeling means. Notice that it is there.

I Was Still Here

Something else happened that day.

After church, I rode home with my family along Kalanianaole Highway. Their conversation seemed to fade away. Sunlight flashed through the trees and touched my cheek. I heard the tires moving over the asphalt. And suddenly I became intensely aware of myself.

I could feel my body taking up space in the atmosphere.

For so long, my attention had been claimed by what had happened and by what needed to happen next. Jeff was dead. Jeffrey needed care. My own injured body needed to heal. Life demanded things from me, and I did them.

But I was still a person moving through the world.

And something about simply noticing that felt strangely soothing. I wasn't suddenly healed. I hadn't decided what my future would be. In fact, I was heading home to wrestle with feelings I could barely name. But I was here. I could feel myself taking up space in the world, and for that moment, there was something strangely soothing in simply being aware of it.

Notice

Are there moments when you become aware of yourself—not only as someone who has lost, or someone doing what must be done, but simply as you?

It might be something very small: noticing the weather against your skin, becoming absorbed in music, wanting a particular food, laughing before you realize you are laughing, becoming curious about something, or simply noticing yourself in a room. There doesn't have to be a meaning attached to it.

When Life Comes Toward You

I certainly did not march confidently back into life after that afternoon. I resisted. I questioned. I retreated.

Then my brother invited the mysterious man from church to my parents' house. His name was Darrell.

We talked until nearly six o'clock in the morning. Before he left, he kissed me on the forehead, and I felt it in my toes.

We spent time together after that. We snorkeled. We talked. We went to the beach. He irritated me terribly once by abandoning me to a wave at Sandy Beach and laughing while I washed ashore covered in sand. I wondered whether becoming friends with him had been a terrible mistake. And still, something in me kept responding to him.

That frightened me too.

At times, I felt as though I were betraying myself and my marriage. I was still wearing my wedding ring. I was falling in love with one man while still carrying my love for another. I did not yet have language for holding those realities together.

But one day at Hanauma Bay, I noticed something else. I looked around at the contented people surrounding us and realized that, strangely, I felt like a welcomed guest in their happiness.

It was remarkable simply to feel a part.

That moment matters to me now because I wasn't trying to achieve it. I hadn't conquered grief or decided that it was time to move on. For a little while, I simply found myself inside life rather than looking at it from somewhere outside.

The world had not become the world I had before Jeff died. And I had not become the person I had been before he died. Still, life could reach me.

What Reaches You?

My story happened to include Darrell. Yours does not need to include another relationship—or anything resembling mine. The question underneath my story is larger than romance.

Sometimes life reaches us through another person. Sometimes it is work, friendship, beauty, humor, music, an idea, a place, a meal, a conversation, a desire, or something we cannot quite name. And sometimes our response to it is complicated.

We may want it and resist it. We may enjoy something and grieve because we enjoyed it. We may find ourselves interested in a future we did not ask to have.

So rather than asking whether you are ready to move forward, try a different question:

Has anything in the world reached you lately?

You don't have to turn it into a decision. Just notice.

My Yes

Eventually, my story did arrive at a yes.

Darrell and I were walking through the zoo talking about marriage. I had resisted the conversation many times. Even then I had plenty of reasons why marrying again might not make sense.

Somehow our conversation wandered into the ridiculous problem of what color I could possibly wear if I ever married again. I said I wanted something I called clear pink. Darrell asked what clear pink was.

We turned a corner and there it was: a tree covered so completely in delicate pink blossoms that I could barely see its green. I wanted to believe that absurdly beautiful tree had bloomed for me. Then the wind came, and the blossoms began falling around us. I said yes.

That was my yes. It does not need to be yours.

What matters here is not that I remarried, nor that saying yes is the proper destination of grief. What I can see now is how much had happened before that word ever left my mouth.

I had felt outside the ordinary world. I had been frightened by my own capacity to imagine a future. I had wrestled with the fear that loosening my hold on suffering might somehow loosen my hold on Jeff. I had noticed myself taking up space in the world. I had resisted life and been reached by it anyway. And for a moment at Hanauma Bay, I had found myself inside happiness again.

The yes beneath all of those moments was larger than marriage.

Life was still happening. And somehow, impossibly, I was still part of it.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

Has anything in the world reached you lately?