Love is now mingled with grief

To my late grandmother

sleepless (adj.) — “unceasingly active or operative”

A part of her went to sleep a long time ago, quietly folding beneath dementia, but some things were never lost. Her smile. Her sweet eyes. Those apple-shaped cheeks and the mouth lines my children inherited.

Though Grandma didn’t know me anymore, a deep joy would surface. She watched the older boys build rock towers, doodled a picture for my daughter, and savored the curls and flushed cheeks of my then-toddler. Her eyes twinkled. Her laugh shone the same as ever.

The call woke me at 6:47 AM. “Rachael, Grandma passed away last night.” My dad’s voice both even and heavy, sharing the inevitable news.

I laid back in bed, holding my husband’s hand in the darkness. Grandma always had Reeses’s peanut butter for us (which made my heart giddy) but toasted the sandwich bread (which disappointed the roof of my mouth). She and I created a beanie baby worm from scratch. We ate too many of her homemade biscuits. She celebrated my straight A’s with free doughnuts at Krispy Kreme. I first found the book Mary Poppins at her house and knew she was proud of my accomplishments in scouting. She delighted in my husband and my babies.

Even now, my womb rumbles with another life, a baby who will arrive unaware. He will soon leave “the restricting spaces of the womb to enter the immensity of life.”¹ We will cuddle him skin-to-skin, treasuring his vulnerability and embracing his absolute trust.

We will endure the sleepless: nights without adequate unconsciousness, fighting the endless temptations to worry.

Indeed, we are sleepless already.

Our longings and prayers began before the test showed its two lines. Before the ultrasound filled our ears with a heartbeat, eliciting giddy sighs of relief. Before we knew his name.

We were already changed.

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”²

I’ve been here before: my body sheltering an unborn child while my heart grieves the loss of someone beloved. The sorrow and love mingling.³ Crying for my grandmother, I’m snotty and hiccuping as the growing baby nudges my abdomen.

I feel the immensity of life. Aware of my helplessness and vulnerability, I’m struck by how God is sleepless and yet rests. My motherhood and personhood have no pause, but calm still lives.

This baby exists at the brink: already part of this sleepless world though utterly sheltered and safe.

Grandma is at rest now, her soul stretching with the most wholeness she’s ever known.

The immensity of life is before, behind, and to all sides of me. I am sleepless. Even as I seek and know moments of rest, I live today in peril and love.

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Parts of this life are indeed sleepless, and we can feel so weary toward it.

I wonder: where do you find rest amid the needs and sorrows of life? Where is there impossible joy? Where does grief need space and a name?

Holding love and sorrow alongside you,

Rachael

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the October series, "Sleepless."

1. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

2. Margaret Silf’s Inner Compass, as quoted by Emily P Freeman on The Next Right Thing podcast: https://emilypfreeman.com/podcast/337/

3. A nod to “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” — See, from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?