The Double Helix of Love & Grief
Two white trillium flowers rise from the forest floor. Green leaves surround the three white petals, and yellow center of one flower. Brown sticks and green leaves cover the ground.
In this spring season, there’s an entwining alive in my mind and heart. In conversations, in readings, in the natural world, I keep hearing the double pulse of love and grief, love and grief. This rhythm, these experiences that live inside and alongside one another, keep arising, and calling my attention. My heart turns to the Mother Trees, as it so often does when I’m trying to better understand something that feels central to this business of being alive.
Right now, wherever I go, I see blossoming flowers, blooming trees, the warming earth, buds bursting. All around there’s a sense of waking up, of eyes opening - there’s a vibrance and a pressing presence. In my own life, there is so much joy. My work (paid and unpaid) feels nourishing for me and my community - it’s work I love and that I’m proud of. I’m in the midst of planning a summer wedding to my wonderful, beloved partner. About a week ago, I had the heart-flooding honor of legally adopting the child I’ve been Mama to for 4 years. It’s so much goodness, and I say it all the time: I don’t know how I got so lucky.
At the same time, there is so much pain and grief, all over the world. I have long been that person who wants to talk about the sad stuff, the heavy stuff, the dark and scary stuff. Sometimes, I know it’s too much for people. The thing is, I just can’t look away, not for long anyway. I can’t pretend that when humans and other beings are hurting and being harmed, even far away, that it doesn’t matter - that I don’t have some kind of responsibility. Even if the best I can do is to witness, as much as I can.
Here’s the thing - love and grief are beloveds, they’re inseparable. We can’t truly have love without creating space in our hearts for grief. How can we deeply love ourselves or another without honoring grief and loss? Whether that’s loss and grief we’ve already experienced, or that we know will come, one way or another? If we try to ignore or forget the pain forever, our lives dull and dim, we withdraw from the world of possibilities and relationships.
I’ve been a Mama before. Before I became Mama to my dear one that lives with me now, here, in my home, I was Mama to two tiny ones that grew inside me. I lost them both, in tears and blood. I was Mama, too, to a child that desperately needed a safe home for what was supposed to be a week, and turned into a year. She lives with another family now, and is a mostly long-distance child of my heart. We get about one visit each year for hugs and catching up, while I wait to cry until I’m alone again.
The joy of adopting my sweet one is real and beautiful, and it doesn’t diminish or remove the loss of those others. My grief for them lives in my heart always, keeping them close and warm. This grief is also my joy, because it means I am their Mama, in some way, for always. And because I am/was their Mama, I get to mother my sweet child. My heart is bigger now than it once was, in part because of the space they who came before created inside of it.
And my grief connects me to others. Our roots come together in the shared understanding of the heart and gut-wrenching-ness of loss. Our grief and our loss are totally unique for each of us, and there are (sometimes ragged) tethers that connect us to everyone else who has grieved. That I’ve been through the dying, and the death, and the after of those I’ve loved who aren’t here anymore (not exactly, not in the same way), creates an invisible tie to everyone else whose heart has been broken and cracked, too.
The Mother Trees nurture and protect their family and their community. They live through times of abundance, when there is plenty (but not too much) of sun and water, and no insect infestations or diseases spreading root to root and tree to tree. In these years, their rings grow wide. They grow up and out, turning light and air and dirt into their own growing bodies. Right alongside these rings of joy and life-living-itself-big, are tiny, almost uncountable rings. A year of wildfire, drought, lightning strikes, unfriendly bugs of all kinds: the tree contracts, conserves their resources, does their damnedest not to die. But they don’t stop being a Mother Tree. They don’t stop being the hub of the forest, the tree with the most connections to all of the others. Their grief lives right alongside their joy - a ring of joy spiraling into and out of rings of grief and pain, and back again.
So I look to them to remember that even when we grieve, we are deeply connected. Even when it feels like everyone pulls away. Even when it feels like no one understands or cares. Those connections are there. And perhaps, maybe, we can turn to the other Mothers, in forests nearby and faraway, and ask them for support in the lean and scary times. We can ask them to keep reminding us how to stand strong, sway in the wind when it comes, pay attention to our own needs and capacity, and share out to others once and when we’re firmly rooted. And may we learn from the ancestors who teach us that when we fall, someday, our bodies can keep on nourishing our community and kin. Our bodies and spirits, in their slow decay, feed the new and growing ones - and we live on, and on - just as they do in us.
Two small brown branches lay on the forest floor. Light brown mushrooms grow from one. Across one branch is a small conifer twig, from which grows a tiny white mushroom.
I thank this double pulse of love and grief for creating life and meaning for us. This swirled-together double helix that can’t be untangled - it is the foundation of what it means to be human, to be part of this world. It is only with each other, in the fullness of who we are - in the willingness to be alive to each other’s sorrow and jubilation - that we discover who we are, and what we can be to each other.
