I will take you life, and I will love you again

​A friend of mine lost someone very close to her last year. We've been planning a work event together, and in those meetings I have seen the sadness. I have heard the struggle. Even as she doesn't mention it much.

I suppose I can feel it so deeply because I can deeply imagine the pain. A pain I know ripples through her precious little family.

And I suppose I can feel it because loss doesn't always come in the form of death. Loss sometimes looks like losing your love for life for many different reasons.

Grief isn't a competition, it's a sadness. It's a struggle. It's one's suddenly difficult relationship with living.

My friend sent me an email yesterday about our work. At the close of the email, she included this poem by Ellen Bass called The Thing Is:

to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air,
heavy as water, more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weighs you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think,
How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face between your palms,
a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

I don't know if my friend sent this poem as assurance that she is okay, or as a encouragement that I will be okay, or as an expression of hope that we are all going to be okay.

I really don't know.

But after reading it several times, I know I received it as all three.

I am a visual person. I often find comfort in imagery. And what a beautiful image...

Then you hold life like a face between your palms,
a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Maybe we all, even if just for today, can take life like a face between our palms and commit to loving it again.

For many, I recognize that won't be easy. Love never is.

But it is hard to ever love anything again if we can't begin with life itself. Life, the gift I've been given this morning, and you as well.

Hold it between your palms. And you say, yes, I will take you.

I will love you again.

If you have loved life before, it is so worth loving again.