Am I Making This Worse?

Thoughts on the sweetness & pain of connection and loss.

A couple of weeks ago I flew out to the Pacific Northwest to visit my sister and her two kids. For over ten years, I’ve visited about once a year, first for sister trips where my brother in law would adopt me as a part of their little tribe that only consisted of them and their cats, and then, eventually, in the role of being an aunt and godmother to their two precious little ones.

When those nuggets were babies, I would hold them and snuggle them, still spending the majority of my time and energy connecting with my sister, continuing life with little bundles of joy (or cries) journeying along with us. We continued to climb mountains, take ferries to islands off the coast, hike through enchanted forests to the beach, and stroll through fields of lavender.

And as those little nuggets got bigger and bigger, my attention has been spread more and more between everyone in their family. Now when I go, I’m embraced by my sister — arguably the most significant attachment figure of my childhood — and two tiny humans who adore me full stop and have been counting down the days until my arrival. My brother in law and the cat are generally excited to see me too :)

Trips there are now associated with silly laughter and savoring snuggles, time soaking up being with each other in person when we don’t just see each others’ faces across a screen, but instead, time when they can place their tiny fingers on my face, knowing at a gut level that I am there, with them.

And as the depth of connection has grown each visit, the goodbyes have become more and more difficult. As all of my embodied being gets to enjoy their nonstop hugs and cuddles, I’m aware of what I will be saying goodbye to when I take a plane home. And the older they get, I see them becoming more and more aware of the pain of these goodbyes as well, the last one jumping to the top of most painful goodbyes we’ve had to say.

Just a couple of days into the trip, my nephew started to make sure he knew how many days he had left with me, double checking the time and jumping straight to bargaining to see if I could stay longer. And my last night with them, as we drove the kids home from swim practice, my niece unraveled. I saw her fall apart into tears in a way I hadn’t seen before, a way that felt like it tore my heart.¹

As I held her close and cried with her, pained by her pain, a part of me wondered, Am I making this worse? Without me coming to visit, these tears wouldn’t be happening. Without me coming and integrating into their lives for the week, they wouldn’t know the pain of having to say goodbye to my presence with them. Without me coming to visit, the grief of me traveling home wouldn’t be a problem.

Now, we could quickly jump to, Of course it’s worth it and I’m not actually making it worse and feeling is part of living… but instead of jumping there, let’s take our time getting there…

Hearing that sweet girl wail as her body convulsed in my arms made me want to do anything to help stop the pain she was feeling. A part of me that wanted to put out the fire of grief genuinely wondered if I hadn’t thought out the pain I could cause by visiting and then leaving. We had been counting down the weeks and days for my arrival for months, all I had been thinking about was the excitement of our time together, not the departure.

And as I’ve chewed on those words that went not only through my mind but also through my bones (Am I making this worse?), I’m brought back to a theme that I’ve been learning for years, a theme that’s been especially prevalent in the last year — life, relationships, faith, and all the things are, well, all the things, including joy and sorrow, grief and glee, and everything in between. We know this, I’m not saying anything new or novel. Instead, I’m sharing what some parts of me are still learning, even if my thinking brain is already aware this isn’t a new thought.

There are parts of me that are still getting comfortable with the fact that life is not as black and white as I might like it to be, parts of me that wish things weren’t so messy or complex. I don’t want to cause other people to feel pain and I don’t want to feel pain, especially if it’s related to sharing in sweet connection of relationship with each other. These parts of me don’t know how to make sense of world where holding loved ones will also mean holding some sort of grief, a world where we can experience seemingly perfect moments of bliss that inform contrasting depths of pain and loss.

These parts of me feel the depth of my nieces pain and my nephew’s longing as they told me over and over, I wish you would never leave. And as I reread this, I think, No, these parts of me aren’t “still getting comfortable” with the pain that comes with this connection, they don’t like it at all and hate that being alive and feeling means feeling the weight of these kinds of emotions, not online in myself, but also as they resonate with what’s swirling inside of someone else that I love.

And so where I land right now is, maybe it’s ok for these parts of me to be mad that feeling means feeling the pleasant and the not so pleasant things of life. Maybe I can have peace with only some parts of me knowing that it’s worth it to feel all of the things, that feeling like this helps me know that I’m fully alive, and it’s worth it to feel the depths of pain because they inform the heights of joy I also get to risk and jump into. And as I have peace about that, maybe I allow the other parts of me that aren’t as on board with pain that runs through them to be at peace right where they are, not trying to force them to put on a smile or pretend they’re ok, but be right where they are, as they are, and tending to them there.

The parting note that my nephew gave me before I left. I held it together in the last 24-hours until I saw this, and then I unraveled with them. The cat joined us for many snuggles, and my nephew would be right by my side, pretty much all the time, including when I would PT exercises for my knee twice a day at a chair, hence the chair in the picture…!

1. Shout out to Twenty One Pilots and their song Tear in My Heart… I would sing this song before dating my husband, when I didn’t know if we’d find our way to each other…!