Carry On

” Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried” – Megan Devine

This is the most true statement I have ever read in relation to grief and how it changes you.

I am lucky because my loss was not final. Since my diagnosis I have lived two years and I continue to give the appearance of health. Perhaps that appearance will be my reality. Time will provide those answers.

Yesterday I went for a walk early in the morning. The sun was rising in the sky and promised an unusually mild and bright February morning. Everything around me seemed to be preparing to spring back to life after a long and cold winter. I could feel the sun warming my back as it projected a long tall silhouette of my frame. A giant of ridiculous proportions. It made me smile.

I wrote previously of feeling hopeful but it has felt like a glimmer of something. Not quite concrete enough for me to carry forward. But yesterday in the warmth of a spring morning I did feel full of hope. Heartened by the frozen things around me beginning to thaw. I felt hopeful and I realised that hope doesn’t have to be about expectation. It can simply be a feeling and a way of being. It’s the way I want to be and I think it is the way I was, until I got cancer.

I wrote this-

 

Awakenings.

 

February,

And the sun is rising.

Warm at my back

It projects-

A flickering silhouette.

A giant

With impossible legs.

 

Beneath my feet

The ground yields.

A surprising thaw.

Somewhere-

An invisible bird

Trills.

 

Something stirs-

A consciousness

A memory

An eternal spring-

Hope-

without expectation.

 

And it rises

Warm at my back

Projecting

With flickering lights-

The possibility…

And it grows.

 

So I will carry my grief forward. But I will also carry hope, without expectation.

I feel imbued by that. As if something has lain dormant within me for the longest time and has finally begun to stir.

I’m going to nurture it. Feed it with love and light. And this is how I will carry on.