I keep asking: why so many doors?

It’s a strange thing. One door closes. My Mother passes into eternity. A relationship changed. Memories left to be sifted through. A love to reimagine and rediscover and re-embrace. It was one door that closed and certainly opened for her into eternity.

But why so many other doors clamor now for my attention?

Doors of loss. Doors of ungrieved sorrow. Doors that closed too soon and doors that closed too late.

When someone passes into eternity, we don’t go with them. Our love and friendship and future and shared dreams are no longer the same. What we had built together collapses in a great sigh. The memories that structured our day and our togetherness simply disappear, or we need to carry them forward on our own. The memories that once made us laugh, now bring up tears. Even their name, so beautiful, catches in our throat.

Why do so many doors these days haunt my dreams and fill my prayers?

Grief tends to open wounds that had been long forgotten and passed over, tucked away and wished away….

Grief shows us the many doors that hide deaths still not mourned, losses we’ve experienced along the way of life.

An illness that changed the direction of our life, a path taken that plunged us into unexpected sorrow, the sting of rejection and the pain of failure.

Losses that often had been bravely soldiered through. Now, in great tenderness, our heart hears the whisper, “It is time.”

The long empty hallways where something of ourselves had died… It is time to walk them. To listen to our steps… To hear our own breathing… To be led by wisdom and mercy down the labyrinths of broken dreams to reclaim our life. To meet ourselves now ready to live. To find the secret of inner harmony and integration and serene peace and an ever-living hope, a flame that does not die.

I prayed with this image one morning. The empty, sterile, too-tidied halls that represented the many losses of my life were quietly frightening. But with my hand in Jesus’ hand, we did not run from them. “Something in you died here, when you had your stroke at twenty-one.” He was kind and tender and gentle. He knew. He always knew. And now he was helping me to find again what had been taken from me by what happened.

“Something in you died there too….” Like an elderly wise one, a grandfather who had seen a thousand years, Jesus opened the doors one after another.

Let the sorrow pound the soul’s shores like the ocean’s tides.

As we walked, the empty halls began to fill up with furniture and flowers, and through the  windows the sun’s rays frolicked across the warm floor. And music and dancing and joy and laughter….

Death and loss steals away the carefree trust that life will bless me, that it will never hurt. Grieving, slow and gentle, closes the too many wounds that have been left in their wake with the promise that all is love and all is still loved.

The many doors I have explored, since my Mother walked through the eternal door that awaits us all, have brought me once more to touch the joy and the laughter that was once mine and is still there. In time grieving melts into a larger loving and a newly reclaimed and received sense of identity.

We do not grieve alone.  

Feature image credit: Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash