Strange Grace

Letting Love Take Me Under

“I miss you” he’ll say.

“Well, you wanted to go on this trip halfway around the world, you need to enjoy it!” I’ll reprimand.

This is often the conversation we have when he travels internationally, while I am the effortlessly cool girlfriend who sets him free to follow his own wanderlust.

I was smacked squarely in the forehead with conviction the first night of my own solo trip just a short 2.5 hour flight from home.

I called Michael tearful that first night. Missing him, hormones irregular, a painfully long and intense period my unexpected travel companion. Oh, and she’d brought her own plus-one…historic anxiety I haven’t felt in years.

“I feel afraid being here alone” I tearfully admitted. He asked if I was somewhere safe. I assured him the pricey Airbnb I had selected was plenty safe, and that my feelings were likely more hormonal than anything else.

What he met me with was a strange grace, the kindness of which I still cannot fathom, nor accurately describe. And this is him. He is soft when I am sharp. He is safe when I am unpredictable. He offers grace and compassion in every single moment in which he could hold the upper hand.

His gentleness is medicine to my heart. In that moment, I realized it has been me, not him that has held back. I have frequently interpreted us not being married as him not being “all in” in some way, even when my deepest knowing has shown me otherwise. He’s always been “all in” even before he knew he was. It has been me though, that has allowed my own fear - of so many things - but mostly of loss, to create the divide.

I realized as I cried to him on the phone and said “I need to figure out how to do this by myself, because you’re 10 years older than me, so I know I’ll be alone when you go…” this created a whole new meltdown in me. The acknowledgment that what is actually buried is the same thing that’s always buried. I don’t know if I’ll be okay alone.

“You’re never alone, Jesie, and you never will be” he said. And he’s so heartbreakingly right about that. Which makes me love him even more, and fear losing him even more.

It’s a terrifying thing to love. Because who, and what we love, has a power over us. And I’ve thought for so long that I am deeply brave, and while I believe that, I think there is that part of me that has not leaned all the way in to love, because I know that a love like that doesn’t let you survive it without taking all of you.

This is the love I see in so many of my clients who have lost their spouses. They are no longer them. Versions of themselves, yes, but they enter my office as if they’ve been split in half and haphazardly mended… I know they become whole again, but they are never the same. And I guess some stupid little part of me thought that if I didn’t give all the way in, that maybe it won’t hurt so bad one day if I have to encounter that grief.

And I’m so much better at preparing Michael for the loss of me, than I am allowing him to love me until we lose each other.

I was so angry at myself for needing and wanting and missing so badly. “I lost my guts…” I joked with a friend. “No, you’ve just created a life for yourself that you don’t need that kind of space from” she reflected back. And she’s right. Because I love Michael, and our dogs, and our house, and every single thing about us, including how we give each other room to breathe every single day.

And that strange grace he showed me, so available for my wounded heart. I don’t know what I’d do without it. But I know I can’t keep living like I’m losing it, because it’s keeping me from drowning in the love I need to let overtake me.

That strange grace he offered me, is still offering me, every day I let love take me under.

So I’m learning to stop rehearsing the ending.
To stop rationing the love that’s already here.
To let myself be held by this strange grace.