Some Weeks Hold Everything
Some Weeks Hold Everything
Last Friday morning I stood at the flagpole outside our administrative campus with a crowd of my colleagues. September 11. Twenty-five years, and the number still doesn't sound right when you say it out loud. Nobody talked much while we waited. Though the traffic noise made it hard to hear the words being shared, the honor was there. The flag went to half staff and we stood there in that particular kind of quiet that a group of people makes when they're all remembering something different at the same time.
By early afternoon I was in a golf cart—laughing so hard I couldn't breathe.
It was a team-building outing, and I will not defend anyone's driving, golf ball or golf cart—mine included. There were inside jokes that would make no sense to you. There were shots that went so wide right, that they deserved their own zip code.
These are the same people I sit with on the hardest days — the ones where the news is bad and the decision is worse and nobody has a good option to offer. I know what their faces look like in those rooms. And here they were, doubled over, wiping their eyes for an entirely different reason.
I felt something strange riding back up the fairway. Not guilt exactly. More like a question. Am I allowed to be having this good a time today?
And then I looked at the rest of the week.
My 7 year old great-niece, Emmalee, went to an Ella Langley concert, and she pulled her up on stage to sing with her. On stage. Every single person who loves that girl posted about it over the next 24 hours-and I watched the whole family (on both sides) light up like a switchboard, everybody claiming her, everybody happy for her and so very proud. It went viral. The video of Ella and that little girl who represents little Gallia County as Little Miss Gallia County even got picked up by the Today Show. I have not stopped grinning about it.
In that same weekend, a relative who has been estranged from our immediate family for a long time was back in our hometown, visiting other family. One of our kids happened to drive past and saw them there on the porch, just a windshield away. There was shared hurt and confusion during that phone call. And here is the part that sits in my chest— we can’t really tell you anymore exactly why things broke. Only that they did, and it’s sad, and that nobody has found the door back yet.
The week moves on. We had dinner with friends and spent the whole meal counting up everyone's good news — this one's promotion, that one's baby, whose kid did what. The kind of dinner where nobody looks at a phone—and the kind where no one remembers to take a picture, because it’s comfortable.
And then the Buckeyes led most of the game and lost anyway, which we all experienced together, in different houses. Our family shares the emotion over text.
Joy. Grief. Comfort. Pride. That low ache that has no good name. One week.
Here's what I keep bumping into.
Everything about the way we live now pushes us to pick one. Choose the feeling that's supposed to be the real one and put the others away somewhere. Grief says you shouldn't be laughing today. Joy says don't bring that sad thing up, you'll ruin it. Pride says focus on the good. Comfort says just let it go. They all sound so reasonable one at a time.
But I have never once had a week that cooperated.
I don't think the laughing in that golf cart dishonored anything. I think it was the other half of the same thing. You stand at a flagpole because life is precious, and then you go be alive with people you'd stand at a flagpole for. That's not a contradiction. That's the whole point.
And I don't think being lit up about my Emmalee’s moment of fame means I have to stop grieving a relationship none of us can explain the loss of. Both are true. Both are mine.
When I wrote the S.T.A.Y. framework, the part I thought would be easiest was Anchor Here. Just be present. Stay in the room. How hard could that be.
Turns out it's the hardest one, and not for the reason I expected. It isn't hard to be in the room. It's hard to be in a room where the feelings won't agree with each other, and to not go looking for the exit. The exit looks like numbing out. It looks like performing the one acceptable emotion. It looks like scrolling past the thing that hurts so you can stay in the part that feels good.
Anchoring doesn't mean feeling one clean thing. It means not leaving when you feel several.
So if you had a week like mine — if something beautiful happened at the same time something is still broken, if you laughed on a day you thought you shouldn't, if you felt proud and heartsick inside the same hour — you're not doing it wrong.
Some weeks hold everything.
You're allowed to hold it too.
With love & light (and a dose of grace for the whole week),
Heather
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