An open letter to Saint Brigid

(Originally posted 6/7/2009)
One of the most painful things about loss is the way it seems to consume hope, faith and peace in its fires.

The landscape you once knew becomes a post-apocalyptic shell, littered with the ghosts of moments and photographs never to be. Birthday cakes, picnics, rocking chairs and graduation caps. An empty cradle or socks that no longer have an owner.

And in these charred remains, you look to the familiar nooks and crannies where hope and faith and peace have always been tucked neatly away in the past. But sometimes loss is so great, it leaves only the ashes of even those things, which are so desperately needed now.

“Time will right this,” you’re told. “This is just God’s will,” is the other refrain of this macabre chorus. And though you want to believe those words and those people, time passes, and no sense is made of this loss. How many hours before something that cuts this deep begins to scab?

You begin to do the things they say you need to do. You eat food, though it is tasteless. You speak with friends, though they can’t truly relate. You listen to the songs that made you smile in your days of ignorance of the pain that awaited you. But the slide-show of “should have been” continues to play, and the pain still throbs in the place your heart once was.

Time, you learn, can’t right this. Because as wrong as it feels, it is right—whatever that means. Sometimes pain, the deepest pain, is the experience that was meant to be had here. Maybe the reason will never be clear. Maybe, so far as you’re concerned, there isn’t one.

But the planet spins on, greeting the sun anew each day. And after many rotations you notice a shifting in the ash of this strange landscape. Something flitters lightly beneath the char, in the place where faith and hope and peace one were. You gather the courage to investigate and there, budding up against impossible odds, are faith, hope, and peace. And like the phoenix, which must die in the fires when it becomes weak so it may be reborn powerful, faith, hope and peace bloom into something stronger than you have experienced before. They, like you, have been battle-tested, and though scarred, have proven their ability to endure.

Some places, in the burnt remains of your world, are washed clean with the rains. Some of the ashes scatter in the winds, and some damage is repaired with love and family and friends. And some isn’t. Some never can be.

It’s not a fairy tale. You don’t need fairy tales. You didn’t come here expecting a “happily ever after” and wouldn’t believe it if you found it. What you came to learn is that you are strong, even when you are lost within loss. And that of all the things found to be flammable in this heartbreak, those things most essential are not.

Faith, hope and peace will return. They are stronger than even this pain.

So are you.