Angels Unawares

"I am moved to tenderness by what we cannot bear/ humbled by what we can and do and learn to share." ~Carrie Newcomer

This will have to be a short post as it is now midnight, and my wine glass (such a rare indulgence) is in hand.

I had a hankerin' to hear Carrie Newcomer's Regulars and Refugees as I hadn't heard it in some time and it is such a calming album when one needs relief from overwhelmed-ness or needs a faith-boost in humanity. The former was my issue tonight, not the latter, fortunately. And in the first song, I hear this line...I am moved to tenderness by what we cannot bear. I've been trying to find a way of expressing this feeling for literally an entire year, longer even than that. This intersection of sorrow and joy...that life is both astonishingly beautiful and astoundingly sad.

In losing my grandparents, I didn't know how to handle this emotional hybrid that nearly paralyzed me with its unexpectedness. Never had grief for me been so adulterated with this unexplainable and confusing love and joy. Loss had always been so shocking, so raw, so devastating, nothing like the slow dance of goodbyes that we got with PaPa and Gan-Gan. When we said goodbye to PaPa, there was this moment where I was holding his limp hand, looking at my grandmother's aching heart on her face, the rest of our family gathered around his bed, my mother's hand on my shoulder. And I just started to sob uncontrollably, burying my face in my mother's side to hide from this feeling. It wasn't sorrow, or not exactly. I still don't understand exactly. Here we were watching this man slowly drown, and all I could think was, "I'm the luckiest person in the world!" Because I was there to witness it. Because we were all together in our grief. Because so much had been said and unsaid, done and not done.

And then a few months later, after five years of watching Gan-Gan's mind go, we stood around her in the Hospice House and watched her body go. And a few hours before she died, we crammed in her room (she was a prolific woman with prolific children, so there were a lot of us, not to mention her own siblings) and passed out crudely-made print outs of the world to all our favorite hymns (or really just my favorite hymns, since I was the sap who had made them) and we sang. And we had all four parts and even as we dropped in an out with tears, we sounded so good. The old ones sang and the little ones sang and the rest of us in between. And my grandfather even sang through the cloud of his unimaginable sorrow, though mostly he just cried. And I swear to God, I thought my heart might just burst out of my chest. It was perhaps the most beautiful moment of my life so far.

I am moved to tenderness by what we cannot bear. That explains it.