“I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.”

All my life, I’ve been on guard against death.

A friend and I were talking about it recently, how we should form a Disaster Preparedness Society, because of how we both brace ourselves against it constantly, whether we’ve had cause to based on our history (her) or whether we are just the kind of people (me) who see it around every corner even if turns out not to be there. The disasters of my life have instead been opportunities full of the unknown, and I’ve turned them into fearsome, looming creatures when they were actually gateways to new life. But it’s not that simple–it never is. Because I wasn’t totally wrong to see them–my years of singleness, a move from Alabama to New York, my entry into motherhood–as a form of death. I wasn’t wrong to experience them as such, because that’s how it seems to work: before new life, death. Winter, then spring. Tombs, then resurrections. Sleep training, then…sleep? Sometimes?

Our family faces a huge decision in the next month. When I heard about it, I sobbed. Engaged in the adult versions of tantrums: indulging an already short fuse, casting withering stares, tossing about the silent treatment, curling inward until all I was left with was my own petulance and the realization that such an attitude was not sustainable if I want to function as a human being, sleep at night, and remain a member of this family. So I prayed for an open heart, and I waited. Threw some more shade, maybe. But waited.

The weirdest thing happened: my heart opened up. If you’re imagining that appearing like a bright light growing brighter, with unicorns and rainbows fluttering about, you’d be wrong. (We sold our unicorn–those things shit all over the place.) No, the open heart experience, while more positive overall than the Mega Bitch Posture, is more of everything else as well. The tears haven’t stopped. But now they’re more appropriately distributed, I would say–less over my own inconvenience and more over what really matters, over what letting go can look like, over uncertainty as it impacts not just me but my children. There are things worth crying over. I’m seeing them pop up everywhere. That’s the thing about grace–it opens not just your heart, but your eyes.

I think I’m learning how to grieve. Which would make sense, given the amount of death in life: the million ways we’re asked (or ahem, forced) to step out without an answer, without a roadmap; without immediate resolution. These are deaths, these U-Haul moves across the country, these losses of freedom at the hands of children, these hours spent on the floor watching urine come out of my child’s yang and cheering when I’d rather just be lying on the couch with another Sex and the City DVD. These are the deaths that preface life, and not recognizing them as such–not allowing myself the full experience of joy and pain, of rejoicing and grief, it may look braver and more behaviorally acceptable to the world but it just stunts my growth right back to that couch, where I’m reaching frantically for my phone or anything else that will displace a feeling I’d rather avoid.

So yeah, I’ve been crying. Crying in the bath over my impatience with the kids that day; crying in bed as I fall asleep over what new life we could be headed for when I’ve just gotten used to this one, thanks; crying in church as prayers are lifted up for victims in Baton Rouge and Minnesota and Dallas and grief is articulated over the ways we’ve misunderstood each other. This hurts, all of it. I’d rather check my phone, post a political fix to Facebook, steel myself against more pain. But I can see now, glimmers of awareness through freshly washed eyes, how guilt and fear and anger can be lids I place on top of sadness to seal it off, to avoid it. But that when the tears flow, they are coming from a deeper place than all those things and yet they are not the deepest thing–sadness is not the bottom. Because beneath that is the beckoning to an even deeper place, a soil where new life grows, where a love that never disappears is found, and holds me through the death part.

The other day we were riding in the car, the boys and I, and The Kid was yelling from the backseat, berating me with directions counter to where we were going. He knows the route to everywhere now, and sometimes he just wants to be contrary. Sometimes he wants a different path than the one we’re on. I switched to Chris Farley mode, all red-faced and angry and about to turn this bus around and really give myself something to cry about later, when I noticed he had stopped yelling. He was, in fact, singing. He had stopped fighting and started singing. We smiled at each other in the rearview mirror.

“Even my darkness is light to you,” we sang at the end of the service on Sunday, after the prayers and the tears and the acceptance of the undeserved bread and wine–the acceptance of the route to the table, through death to life. And I felt my disbelief sway and topple and give way to trust: even my darkness? Yes. Even that. I mean, there is so much of it. You sure? Yes. Tears for the right reason flowed once again, and that’s when the kids came back in, bouncing through after the session of grief we’d just experienced, their joy transforming the dirge into a dance.