Well hello there, reader. Prepare to accompany me on a journey — a pilgrimage, if you will — through the shadowy valleys of grief, across the hills of self-reflection, and into the light of living onward. But not just any journey. This is my journey. One I never quite anticipated to divulge, and yet here we are.
If you have stumbled into this corner of the internet in search of a tale of relentless woe, I must caution you: you’ve taken a wrong turn. For my story — like my life — is a quilt born of joy, loss, love, and a generous dose of sarcasm. Because quite frankly, if we cannot laugh at the absurdity of life, is it even worth living?
Almost three years ago, the dominoes began to fall. The first was the passing of my great grandmother—a woman of such glowing spirit and love, she was more akin to a force of nature than a mere mortal. She helped raise me, teaching me so much about the world, with her wisdom, her laughter, and her uncanny ability to see beauty in the mundane. Her absence left a vacuum, a silence so loud, it rippled through the lives of everyone she ever touched.
But the universe, in its infinite jest, wasn’t quite through. One by one, I watched eleven other friends and members of my family leave this world behind. Old age, sickness, suicide... Every funeral offered a harsh reminder of the impermanence of life, a crash course in the art of saying goodbye, even when every fiber of your being longs to hold on.
I found myself living in a liminal limbo; a space between ‘what was’ and ‘what is yet to come.’ It’s a tough place to inhabit, filled with questions, memories, and a perpetual, dull ache for just one more conversation with one of the dearly departed.
But it's also a place of deep growth and reflection. Grief, for all its cruelty and seams that don't heal, has a way of shedding the inessential, leaving behind the raw essence of who we are. And in that essence, rather than discovering a strength solely from within, I stumbled upon a beacon of light in someone else's work.
This work, a tapestry of words and emotions, served as a lifeline, pulling me back from the brink of my limbo. A reminder that even in our most solitary moments, we are bound together in the shared human experience. A way forward, as much for myself as for the family and friends carrying their own living tributes to journeys ended too soon.
This blog, then, is more than the sum of its thoughts and musings. It's a pledge. A pledge to live, fully. To embrace the tumult and the splendor of life. And to keep writing my story, with these pages and even those that are now too blurred by tears to read.
I invite you to join me on this journey. Let's explore the liminal spaces together, finding laughter in the tears, joy in the sorrow, and light in the darkest of places. Because if there's one thing I've learned from dancing with shadows, it's that even in the deepest grief, there's a spark of life waiting to ignite.
Here's to moving forward, to writing our stories, and to finding ourselves, again and again, in the beautifully messy tapestry of life.