In the midst of loss, let joy find you

Thank you, Elizabeth Berg, for writing The Year of Pleasures

If you wake up too many days feeling empty and frightened, do not be alarmed. You are not alone.

Today I woke up feeling that way, just briefly, but I felt a grip on my throat saying, It’s still real. You are now alone forever. I’m starting to make peace with being alone in a new way, flying solo after 28 years of waking up next to someone.

The truth is, we are all alone. And yet we also aren’t. It’s both.

C.S. Lewis once said, “We read to know we are not alone.” That’s also why I write, to help me and you feel less alone.

Today I opened up my Box of Light and a beautiful beam poured light onto me, just when I needed it.

For decades I’ve used big index cards as bookmarks and jotted down the best quotes in every book. I tucked them in a box and finally decided to open it this year and share what’s in it.

Mary Oliver’s poem inspired me to call it my Box of Light. She wrote this brief bombshell of a poem called The Uses of Sorrow:

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

My husband handed me a box full of darkness when he left our marriage in January. It has been two months since he moved out, but I’m starting to see, tucked in the darkness, so many gifts that sparkle.

When you lose someone to death or divorce, you need time and space to grieve but that doesn’t mean you can’t also find joy, or let it find you. This death of a marriage is also the beginning of something wild and wonderful. Writers like Elizabeth Berg help me look forward to what my heart can’t yet see or feel.

Lately, every time I take myself out to dinner and the server says, “Just one?” it feels like an indictment. Loser! Divorced! Left behind! Of course it’s not, it’s just a new way to be in the world.

From now on, instead of nodding yes to that “just one?” I’m going to loudly and joyfully reply, “I am flying solo today!” Sounds much more exciting, doesn’t it? And it’s true. We can actually soar, even with broken wings.

We can find and create new pleasures along the way. We don’t have to wait for all the sorrow to lift.

In “The Year of Pleasures” a newly widowed woman moves to a small town to reinvent herself and rebuild a life by finding pleasure in simple things, a warm bath, nature, music, art. Elizabeth Berg wrote the novel 20 years ago, but it holds up and will hold up your heart.

She writes of the husband the woman lost, of finding herself “looking at the world through widow glasses.”

His love “was a second heartbeat.”

“He was right in asking to be cremated. For if he was nowhere, he could be everywhere.”

“People build nests in one another’s hearts.”

“Marriage is like working with a net.”

So I’m working without a net but so are so many amazing acrobats. I’m going to soar, not fall. My marriage is no longer my net, but the beautiful writing that others weave will always catch me if I fall.

Berg offers so many gems:

“My mind seemed to uncrinkle.”

“We talked in silence.”

A falling maple leaf becomes “a tiny pair of discarded angel wings.”

Cows in pastures are grouped together “like gossips.”

“I looked up at the sky, gaudy with stars.”

An old friend reaching out says, “Welcome back to our little constellation.”

Her writing left sprinkles of stardust all over me with these words of wisdom:

“Don’t let your habits become handcuffs.”

“Lift the lid off the future.”

“What I felt was hope, that internal sunshine.”

So I’m lifting the lid off the future, creating new habits and reminding myself that hope is an inside job.

It always was.

What’s in your box of light?