Every year, my grief lines up with Lent and Easter, with the turning of winter toward spring. The alignment intensifies things in a way that is both beautiful and overwhelming. My oldest daughter was nine when my twin sister died. Now she is 18. The baby we miscarried, Claire, would have turned nine this year. I have always found satisfaction – and even beauty – in numbers. And every year, there are new depths to the loss and the living.

My heart must be healing because when we moved a province away from our families, I didn’t think about being far away in grief. I am grateful that I didn’t think about it because it might have been enough to stop me from leaping into this season of life. And, every year, my body remembers the losses before my brain.

A weight arrives in February and sits in my bones through April. Just as we all start aching for spring, my body holds the weight of winter’s weariness. I am (sadly) no more in control of the waves of grief than of the whims of the weather. 

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In the face of such powerlessness, I have been reaching into beauty with a bit more intention. Casting on beautiful colours on my knitting needles. Sitting with beautiful music. Pulling out my guitar. Drinking in fresh air and climbing on my bike.

I need to state clearly that all the moments do not feel beautiful. Some of them have been extraordinarily painful of late. Situations that I have no idea how to handle. Hard questions I do not have answers for. Tears that have turned to full body wails. I allow myself to be seduced by the lie that all the moments of my life should be easy. And every time, I have the chance to be reawakened to the reality that much of life is mundane, irritating, and challenging. 

And yet. Beauty remains. It is an antidote to the poison of busyness. It is a salve for sadness and a witness to the long way of things being well. Beauty invites me to stop and notice and receive.

This week, a wild wind brought a series of miniature storms. I watched wicked billowy clouds form over the mountains and bring a visible cluster of snow and rain in a wave, then watched it clear again. Gales whistled through the trees and around the buildings reducing visibility to nothing and then suddenly the sun would shine through and melt the snow before it all began again.

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The hardest moment of this ninth anniversary fell on April 9, the day I last hugged Abbie and saw her standing on the front step of my parents’ house when I dropped my son off for a birthday party across the street. The first three years were pure survival. The next three felt like recovering from a jumpstart to my heart. These last three have been about growing around and beyond the grieving. So much of my life now would be unrecognizable to Abbie, and it is a miracle to hold so much love and beauty after so much devastating pain.

Unable to go to be with my family for Abbie’s death anniversary, I chose to go out to Elbow Falls, a park that she visited often and introduced to us. The creek bed is largely dry, with lots of space for hunting rocks and dry brush growing through. I felt her there, walking with me, and it was brutal and beautiful.

It takes such time and attention to sink deeply into the beauty of all that is. To hold the hurt with the healing. To make space for a story and a world that is so much bigger than me. To move slowly through the grace of it. 

I want so many more days of this wild and beautiful life. More winters and water, more mountains and mysteries, more stories and springs. I will carry Claire and Abbie with me here; there is only living to be done until the end. May the beauty of it never be lost on me. 

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