Allowing the Grief to Drip

 I recently got a tattoo on my arm, I have an ocean theme and my artist added a shell that has drops coming off of it. One would think maybe they are ocean drops, or blood dripping?

At first I didn't like the drops, I just wanted the hard shell, pointy and rigid. Structured, strong, able to bounce off the ocean waves and protect its creature inside. The drops seemed out of place.

I just found out that someone very close to me lost their father in a tragic car accident. I had fallen asleep when I woke up to the text, my sleepy mind confused that I was dreaming and this wasn't real.

The flashbacks to two instances in the last five years of friends that tragically lost their parents and the helpless pit in your stomach feeling that ensues.

I hadn't met my friends father but I felt like I knew him through the stories that were told.  He lived on a big property that adjuncts to a waterfall in southern Ohio.  Coincidently I had just gone to those falls a year ago and never knew they existed. My son and I took gorgeous frozen waterfall pictures, capturing a moving force like a waterfall in ice is a beautiful ethereal experience I highly recommend.

My friend had just texted me the morning of the accident to ask if I wanted to go hiking on this property my next free weekend.  I was excited for the invite and the possibility of meeting his father.

This same morning I had also had been thinking about the fore coming death of my father and ex father in law as both are in frail states with the future unknown.

All of these weird synchronicities tied together make for this labyrinth of understanding what this all means in my head. We always try to make sense of grief and its the one thing that doesn't make any sense.

Its eb and flow nature, its ability to consume us, shut us down, question our beliefs and the world we live in.

Thinking back to my dripping shell, I've realized that even shells shed tears. Whether its when its creature leaves it for a bigger shell, or an abrupt storm smashes it into pieces on a rocky beach.  We need to shed our tears, we need to soften into the unknown.   We need to allow the grief to drip off our shells.