Solace

I sometimes get asked the question whether I’ve found solace since losing Brynn. I’ve never been able to answer it as I wasn’t truly sure I understood what it really meant. Looking up the word, the dictionary states it to be comfort or consolation in a time of distress or sadness. As I sit here wondering do I celebrate our 3rd wedding anniversary, I am having to explore this concept of solace and whether it’s something that I am even searching for and is worth discovering. However, recently I did receive a more poignant question that really made me explore where I am in life. A question that captures the now part of my existence.

"Are you happy?" was the question. A question that one does not encounter that often. A question that sounds so simple, but the answer, as I am learning, has an ever-evolving complexity to it. It was a question that came from someone who most likely understood the complexity and the ongoing relationship you have with the answer. Someone who had to go through their own discovery with the concept and relationship with happiness after losing his wife to cancer around the same age as me. And someone who eventually remarried a person who would become the mother of the woman I’ve been developing a new relationship with. He had a right to ask the question to someone who was dating his daughter, fully understanding what may lie behind the eyes and smile. Life works in a very mysterious way, I must say. 

“Are you happy?” as the question lingered out there for a moment. I responded with the most honest answer I was able to come up with at that time, and said my answer was no longer simple. I am learning to access emotions like joy, playfulness, desire, and curiosity that makes me happy, I continued. I’ve been learning to enjoy the little things and have been looking at the world with a more colorful lens again. But simply answering this nuanced question as “yes” or “no” was not something I was able to do at that moment. We just stood next to each other silently for a while, processing this interaction, wondering the places the other went for that brief moment.        

Afterwards, I spent some time unpacking what I said for my own curiosity: this concept of emotional access. It initially did not come from positive moments or feelings I was experiencing again, but from a dark period in my life and the several episodes that followed and continue to from time to time. Depression, as I reflect, was this dark room I had entered for the first time. It was a room that had no light switch or windows to give me a frame of reference or depth as I continued to remain and walk away from the only light that peeked through the door crack. It felt impossible to just turn around and exit, as my mind wandered towards where this room would lead me to. I had remained in this place for quite some time before I was slowly able to find my way out of it to the rest of the house that was built over many years, with many rooms with windows that provided the lighter side of life. Over the next several months I would find myself in this room again from time-to-time. There were no patterns to the triggers that would make me wander back in, and I became afraid how easily it was accessible. Was this who was left from the experience of loss and grief? Was there permenance to this state? I still wonder whether the residual effects of where I went will remain with me as part of who I am becoming.

Grief is a very living thing, and my relationship with the many phases of it from milestones, memories to living with the confluence of emotions I experience on a daily basis are complex. And as I deal with the complexities of being able to answer that simple question, the daughter is giving me space, safety and support to love and miss Brynn. She is giving me an environment that I am wanting to access happiness, joy, laughter, and playfulness. And she is teaching me to love again.

Solace? There is nothing comforting about the journey and what may be the destination of getting to a point where you accept losing someone you love with all your being. But I’m finding ways to access parts of me that she loved the most. And perhaps that is the transition I’m making… from celebrating to honoring our marriage. Honoring Brynn by rediscovering the person she married, the person who was lucky enough to marry her.