The Day I Did Not Brace

Yesterday I stood at the kitchen counter chopping baby potatoes, the small Duo ones, into halves to cook up for family coming into town. And somewhere in the middle of it I caught myself thinking, this is exactly what I want to be doing today.

Yesterday was three years since Dan died.

And then, still standing there with the knife and the cutting board, the hole reminded me of itself at the kitchen counter and asked me to step inside for a moment. So I did. A big rush of it, right in the heart space, my whole chest pulling in on itself. It did not feel like an emergency. I had room for it. So I put the knife down and went and sat outside on the rocking chair and let myself be with it until it slowly passed.

It did not pull me into any particular memory. I was not even thinking about Dan, specifically. I just noticed where my body was and felt the grief and sat in it. And then it loosened, and I went back inside and kept chopping.

That is the whole day, really, in one small motion. The hole opened at the kitchen counter and I had a way to step into it, and then I came back to the potatoes.

I have braced for this day before. The other anniversaries, I woke up already holding my breath, already scanning for the wave, already organizing my whole nervous system around the size of what was coming. This year I woke up at six in loving arms and fell back asleep. And then fell back asleep again. Until eight thirty, which anyone who has known me through grief will tell you I do not do. I do not sleep in on hard days, or even the easy ones. The body usually will not let me. That is all changing.

This year the body let me.

We walked the dog in the park across the street. The light was like every other morning. The morning was like every other morning. I kept noticing how present it felt, how normal, and I want to be careful with that, because normal is a word that can make grief sound finished. It is not finished. The hole is exactly the size it has always been. Three years has not taken a single inch off it. The tight chest at the counter was proof enough of that.

What was different was the ground I was standing on.

I made it to a yoga class and when I got there the studio was empty. The instructor offered to send me to the later class, since teaching one person can be kind of awkward. I almost left. I went into the locker room and then I stayed. And it turned into an hour of one-on-one instruction, adjustments the whole way through, my body getting exactly the kind of attention it needed on a day like that. I walked in to do the work and the room turned around and did some of it for me.

All day I felt available. Available for the big feelings if they wanted to come, the way the one at the counter did. I was not holding them off and I was not chasing them down. I had set the day up so that anything could arrive and land somewhere. That is the part that is hard to explain to someone white-knuckling their own anniversary right now, and I do not want to pretend I have always had this. I have not. For a long time the hard days were just hard, and the work was simply to be moved through them by a body I had to trust completely because I could not steer. And I will not pretend I have it for good now either. Some anniversary down the line might hand me a day I can only grip my way through. Yesterday was just the shape this one took.

This is a different chapter of the same work. Not a better one. A different one.

There is a garden that grows alongside the loss. The connection, the new love, the dog, the people who show up, the food you make for a family about to fill your house. It does not replace anything and it does not close the hole. It just grows, until the proportions of the whole landscape change, the hole the same as it ever was and the life around it wider.

It needs tending. Movement, food, presence, time in the body. Yesterday I tended it. The yoga, the kitchen, the prep for the day ahead.

And yesterday it also tended me, in ways I did not have to work for. The empty studio that became a private class. The friend who checked in and wanted nothing back, so I could leave the text unanswered all day and feel cared for anyway. Being held through the morning by someone who understood the size of the day without my having to explain it, so that I could sleep inside it. Some days you do the tending. Some days you are so deep in the loss that you cannot, and the garden gets tended anyway, by the routines you built before it got heavy and the people who text without being asked. Both count.

The body knew it would not fall off a cliff. So when the chest pulled tight, I could go sit in it. And so the rest of the day could be full.

Not enough hours in it, actually. The house slowly filling, the two of us moving around each other getting it ready, never quite sitting down to dinner on time because there was too much we wanted to do. And at some point I said it out loud, how lucky we are. To have not enough time in the day for all the things we want to do and all the people we love.

A man died. And my house is about to be full.

Both at once.

You were never meant to grieve alone. Some days the proof is the rocking chair right there when your chest goes tight, and the potatoes still waiting when you come back in.