Giving Thanks

In this ‘season of firsts’ we will be marking Thanksgiving tomorrow for the first time without Mom. Last year at this time was such a blur of hope, despair, exhaustion, faith, and fear…I don’t remember much about Thanksgiving day. We were preparing to bring Mom home the following day on hospice care, and it was so overwhelming at every level. 

In any event, we read a little Mary Oliver every day of Mom’s illness, and this Mary Oliver poem seems to fit where my heart is as we prepare to give thanks tomorrow. I would like to think if I read it to my sweet mama tomorrow, she would know exactly what it means to me. 

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

I’m learning how to dance with my grief and sadness.  I’m trying to use the power of tremendous loss to shape me into a better, more compassionate human. Somewhere in that box full of darkness is the mystery of love. It is truly a gift to remember Mom’s love…to pull it out and wrap myself up in it when I need to feel her close by. I like unpacking the box to examine all the ways that her love, all love really, shaped my world.  There are no words that can fully express how the dimensions of deep grief and love intertwine. Only to say I’m starting to understand the gift. How grateful I am to love and have been loved by her. 

Thankful for all of it. Every single bit of this life. Tomorrow and every day.  ❤