The Sky We Collect

We don't get over grief.

When I was twenty-one, I got my first and only tattoo. A friend was getting one and asked if I wanted to come along. We called to make sure the artist had time, and off we went.

An hour later, I had a tiny plus sign on the inside of my right wrist.

Truthfully, it was a whim decision. Though I have nothing against people who plan their tattoos for months, who agonize over the image and the placement and what it will mean to them, that was not how this came to be. I decided fast and an hour later I had a small black cross, the size of a thumbnail, in a spot I would see every time I turned my hand over.

But if you knew me back then, the plus sign tattoo would have made perfect sense.

Most of my life, I had a tendency to see the glass half empty. In high school, I edited the famous Forrest Gump line, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get,” down to something truer to my pessimistic outlook: “Life is like a box of chocolates. They melted.” I’d say it whenever things weren’t going my way, half as a joke, half as a prediction. The prediction was the part I actually believed.

Somewhere in the aftermath of my mother dying when I was nine years old, my brain began to default to worst case scenarios.

I don’t remember the funeral. I remember small, useless things instead. Endless hugs from people I hardly knew. Being told to go change into something nicer. I remember understanding, in the flat way children understand enormous things, that the rest of my life had just been split into a before and an after.

What I remember most is the absence. The way she stopped being somewhere I could go. Nine-year-olds aren't supposed to learn the shape of a person-sized hole.

The worst case had already happened, while my brain was still wiring itself together, so it drew the only conclusion it could: brace for the worst and the hurt will hurt less. Expect the melted chocolates and you’re never disappointed.

That was the deal I made.

I carried a low, steady dread everywhere I went, every day, for years, and in exchange I would never again be the little girl who got blindsided. It felt like protection. It felt like the smart thing.

It’s taken many years to realize there isn’t truth to that statement.

It doesn’t matter how much you brace or prepare or expect. Trauma is trauma, and grief is grief. When it comes, it washes through you completely, and it rearranges you in ways you won’t notice until years later, when you catch yourself bracing on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.

When I was younger, I believed an arrival also meant a departure. I pictured grief the way it gets drawn in cartoons: a dark cloud parked over your head, raining only on you, until the sun finally breaks through. As if the sun showing up meant the cloud was gone for good, never to be seen again.

But nothing about the grief of my mom dying has ever left me.

Twenty-five years later, the cloud still finds me. It shows up unannounced, in moments of good and ordinary. A mother playing with her daughter at the park as I walk my dog. Her old sweatshirt still hanging in my closet. My own reflection, when it catches me off guard and I see her in it. And just like that, I'm nine again. It doesn't care how many years have gone by, that I built a whole life she will never meet.

For a long time, that felt like failure. I kept waiting for the cloud to pass, for the sky to clear the way I'd been told it would. I'm still learning it doesn't work like that. The clouds don't leave.

You collect them.

Now I wonder if it's the point. We collect a sky. A whole sky, the kind that takes a lifetime to fill. Impossible colors, and long stretches of blue calm, and light that comes in at an angle you couldn’t have planned for if you tried. The clouds don’t leave when the good arrives. They become part of the view. The same sky that held the worst day of my life is the one holding all the rest of it too.

So now, when the dark clouds show up, I try to remember they belong to something bigger. The grief and the color came from the same place. Setting down the grief would mean setting down the love.

So I keep it.

I still have the plus sign on my wrist. I see it every time I turn my hand over and am reminded of when I was certain the chocolates were going to melt. Now it reminds me of something truer. That every joy and every grief become part of the sum. A plus sign doesn’t erase what’s painful.

It simply keeps adding.

And when I turn back at the end of all this, I hope I can look at the whole of it, every cloud and every color, and be proud of the sky. Proud that it held so much. Proud that it’s mine.

I hope, when I get there, she’s the first thing I see.