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Several weeks ago, I was at a little grocery store here in my town, looking for rosemary.
The person I was with was in a real rush, but I needed the rosemary for something I was cooking.
I asked the woman behind the counter if she had rosemary, thinking she could just say yes or no, or point to where it was in her shop. Instead, she gave me the sign for give me just a minute, and said “momentito.”
I could see that she was processing an order that was just coming in, and I really didn’t have time, trying to be mindful of the person I was with who needed to go. I told her I would come back later.
She again made the same sign, and said (in Spanish of course) “Just please give me a minute; I can get it for you now.” But she was still processing the order.
I just stood there awkwardly, periodically running out to see if my friend was at the end of his patience, then running back in and waiting for the woman to finish what she was doing. Finally she came out from behind the counter and said, “Okay, I’m going to get it,” and walked out of the store. “Oh noooooo,” I thought, “this could take forever!” I had no idea where she was going, and after nearly 20 years in Mexico, I also know the sense of time is different. I ran out again to check on my friend, who again repeated, “I really have got to get going.”
So there I am standing in the store feeling a little trapped and like I could do without the rosemary, when the woman comes walking back into the store, beaming, absolutely beaming, holding a beautiful sprig of rosemary. “Aquí tienes!” Here it is! Her face was everything. I asked her how much and she waved me away with an infectious smile. “Nada!”
I was now also smiling from ear to ear, holding my rosemary, as I walked back outside and got in the car to drive my friend to work.
That story probably doesn’t seem like much, but it was a lot to me.
You see, right after my little brother died, in those first immobilizing and other worldly hours, I spontaneously opened my journal and drew a line down the center of the page. On one side I wrote the words “This is real” and on the other side I wrote “This is real too.” It is an exercise I have now done countless times with other folks who are struggling with the traumatic first days after a catastrophic loss.
What I wrote under “This is real” is exactly everything I did not want to be real. Everything that could not possibly be real. My brother is dead. I will never see him again. I don’t know what to do…and whatever else might have poured out of me during those anguishing days when it didn’t feel like any of this possibly could be real.
But it was.
On the other side of the paper, I recall writing “the colors of the fall leaves are resplendent.” I remember that so well, because resplendent is not a word I use often. I don’t know what else I wrote, but I do remember the effect.
It was not that I felt better. It was not a “gratitude list.” It was not “at least I still have these things.” It wasn’t any of that. What is was, was that I was able to put on paper the fact that these absolutely awful things exist, and these lovely and beautiful and delightful things still exist too. One doesn’t cancel out the other, but it reminds me of laying everything out on the table, where I can see everything at once.
If you have been in those dark days of grief, you know that feeling like everything is now dark, everything is gone, and it’s hard to see any of the beauty, of the delight. This exercise helps me, and my clients, to remember that it all is happening at once, and that one day, we will be able to see those things clearly again, because they haven’t gone anywhere, even when the world feels like it’s falling apart. And man does the world ever feel like it’s falling apart right now. Even without the pain of personal loss, we can remember that there really is still light, and that maybe that light will pull us through.
So back to my rosemary story. When I saw that woman’s face, holding her sprig of rosemary, her smile lighting up the room, I thought to myself, “This is real too.”
As Leonard Cohen famously said, “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Sometimes those glimpses of light come in the most unexpected places—resplendent fall colors or a sprig of rosemary—but they are there. We have to keep looking for them, keep remembering them, and keep believing that we will get through this too.
We are all in this together.
~
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