Just a few months after my mom died I was with another mom in the courtyard at school drop off, talking about how my world had stopped and my priorities had changed. I saw the world so differently with my mother gone and was no longer sure of my place in it. The other mom replied that this is the gift of grief. She said when we lose someone we get the gift of seeing the difference, of instantly shifting priorities, and the chance to make different choices. 

Perhaps for the first time in my life, an immediate retort didn’t spill out of my mouth. I didn’t immediately vocalize the crushed, angry thoughts that swelled in my mind. Grief had quieted me, which was no small feat. She said my grief was a gift. My mother had died just a few months prior, and here was this woman telling me that what I was feeling was a gift! I swayed a little on the spot. I breathed out every drop of air inside me and held it. 

At the time, grief often made me exhale completely and wait, for quite a while, before I inhaled again. There was so much time between the exhale of breath and the next inhale, and I existed in that space, inside a high pitched, tense note of stillness. It was a moment that I could not seem to move past. In between breaths I waited. I waited for something to happen, or more accurately I waited for someone to tell me it was all a joke. I waited for the phone to ring and to hear her voice on the other end. I waited for her to come back. I waited in that stillness and looked around, like a child gazing out of the front window for a parent’s return. In between breaths I had time to look around and think. The inhale was too much work. It was busy and loud.

I understood the concept of grief yielding a gift, and on some level it sounded like a nice thing to say, but my grief was still so raw, and the idea that it was anything but insurmountable and horrible was unthinkable. At the time I still beat myself up with blame, what-iffing the past to exhaustion. I thought that if I had only convinced my mother to come live with me, she wouldn’t have died. I wasn’t enough to keep her alive. Knowing this was not a gift.

And now, a few years after her death, with a bit of perspective, when I ask myself if grief is a gift my immediate answer is still an emphatic no. I still cry so often. I still find myself frozen in a moment, watching my children together and realizing with a pang that my mom will never see them grow up. I can’t call her and tell her to look outside at the beautiful full moon tonight. 

As I sit, letting these thoughts pile up, letting my grief out of its cage yet again, giving myself reason after reason for why grief is not a gift and detailing how bad everything is now, a tiny voice in my head whispers. Yes. Look. See it there.

Somehow I found it. Somehow it came, was unearthed, or grew inside me. Now in those frozen moments as I watch my children together, I know what I need to do is break through the stillness and go to them. Instead of watching from afar and sitting in my grief, I hug them and tell them how much I love them. I go into the moment and feel it, to make it a good one and not let it pass. Small moments count for so much now, and we cannot let them pass us by and remain unimportant. 

Yes, very often I hug my children and tell them I love them with tears on my face, but it is better than letting that moment in time slip away untouched, and it is better for us to tell our friends how much they mean to us, to see beauty in the small everyday aspects of life. Take nothing for granted. Seek out the silver lining. Soak up every minute, because before you know it, it could be gone. Grief is teaching me this. 

When my mom was alive she was perpetually positive, often much to my annoyance. Every time I was cynical and dry or dark, she seemed to make it her mission to point out the sunny side of life. Maybe this is because she lost her mother, too, and eventually she discovered this gift. My mother’s mother died of ovarian cancer when I was in elementary school, and I don’t remember her grieving. I remember that she believed in me and she thought I could achieve anything. 

In a way, grief creates superpowers–the ability to create joy for others and x-ray vision that allows one to see through the outer layer of everyday life to recognize the small beautiful things within it. It doesn’t mean we who are grieving aren’t sad a lot of the time. We carry both utter sadness and joy. It can hurt to do this, which is why it doesn’t often feel like a gift.

I think my mother developed these powers after my grandmother died and surreptitiously placed them in me over the years. They remained dormant and unused, and somehow surfaced when she died, as if they were activated by my own grief over time. Certainly not at first, but after a while, there they were. My motherless mother passed them on to me when it was my turn. 

It seems a terrible sort of gift to give or be given, this ability to sense what is important, to appreciate our loved ones in ordinary moments, to walk in nature and breathe deeply, to hear birds chirping and feel our heart break, or to look up at the full moon and begin to cry. It is the same moon. My mother’s moon and my grandmother’s, too. Is grief a gift? This tragic and bitter gift? Certainly no. But yes, whispers the moon. Just look.