The grief we carry, anybody’s grief, is similar in feeling to the weight of a sleeping child.

Love also has weight and the secrets of our hearts will be our courage when we need them most.

No trauma is ever fully resolved. When our longing can no longer speak, peace must be made in our relationship with our grieving. This grief can be held in our amazing ability to see out past our eyes to the eyes of another. We may reach towards someone who will have our back. Support is possible.

To be proved true, a trauma need only occur once, but goodness is proved true by repetition and connection.

We will continue to love as we continue to change. As well, our relationships continue to change because we continue to love. As in every conversation, sometimes our relationships answer us, and sometimes they don’t.

We can feel terrible shame for this. We have the ability to let our humiliation grow larger than our shame. Our humiliation, with support, can move us into empathy.

There is within us waiting anger, waiting sadness, waiting joy, waiting peace. In contact, we will find each other.

We misunderstand when we crawl closer and closer to the ghosts of those we love, and to our own ghosts. Our ghosts reach for us only so that when we are close enough, they can love us enough to push us back into the world.

At the same time that we are disappearing, we may become both one with and more than ourselves. This is the moment of grace where finding ourselves and each other is possible.

The losses we feel are those of one who has passed the point of apprehension; like writing to someone who no longer wishes to be found.

And still, how beautiful is our blood’s pull towards trust. The possibility that the warm weight of trust will unlock the stillness of something broken is the possibility of rest.

It is not a person’s depth we must discover, but their ascent. We can find the path from depth to ascent.

For can anyone tell with absolute certainty the difference between the sounds of those who are in despair and the sounds of those who want desperately to believe? This is the moment when our hope is forced to change, anatomically- mercilessly- into faith.

I don’t know what the soul is, but I imagine that somehow our bodies surround what has always been.