I held my nearly 12 year old kiddo crying against my chest when she came home from school today. I had gotten the email about an hour before from her school counselor, that she just got hit with grief out of the blue. She came through the door with her usual perky ring to her voice, and I invited her in my office after she put her stuff down.

It didn’t take long for her tears to flow.

Nothing obviously sparked the grief, it came at her during science class, and the teacher let her sit with a friend in the hallway to talk. I’m glad I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t always try to solve the tears. At least, not my kids tears. We sat, acknowledging the suck, ate some grapes, and encouraged some comfort and care (bath, comfy blankets, comfy jammies).

Meanwhile, I feel… fine?

This week’s letter has been hard to write. Maybe getting my latest tattoo finished last weekend cured me of the crushing grief. Maybe my boss going through multiple days of intensive “how to fool people into believing you’re not AuDHD” mentoring is a part of it. Maybe it’s that I can’t get a memorial park bench for Jon, or the last bits of the estate wrapping up, a call from the family’s financial advisor, or my mom working on moving to senior housing.

I got the oil changed in my car, and life just went on. I’ve got some paint samples on my bedroom wall to select for my bedroom makeover. I’ve started to research some travel options for the summer, all of them seem impossible in their own way, because I’m out of practice.

Eldest child noted I seem to want to travel a lot. I’ve always suffered from wanderlust. I admit that astrology is total bunk, and that I’m a Sagittarius through and through. It’s been years since I’ve had the opportunity to travel the way I want to, and as much as I want to see the world, and as much as I’ve already seen so much of the United States, I sometimes fantasize about one of those new electric VW vans and the open roads of North America.

But even without Jon, I’m still pragmatic. I’m somewhat surprised at times that my more-unmasked state is able to refrain from most of my impulses, or at least let be indulged with the guardrails I painstakingly created in my younger days.

I guess all that is to say, I’m glad I don’t feel terrible, but I feel terrible I don’t feel terrible about ever feeling ok.

I was able to think about the mundane joys with Jon this week, and I didn’t break down. It was welcome in a comforting way, that “memory being a blessing” kind of way. Comforting in that “I can’t remember what we ever argued about” kind of way.

In a highly suspicious kind of way.

Did getting my (extremely painful) chest tattoo finished, or seeing ‘A Body to Live In’ (a documentary about Fakir Musafar) finally get me to a new, very clear, next step of grief? Did engaging in the type of ritual bleeding, hours under a needle, that echoed with Fakir Musafar’s story alchemically transmute nostalgia and memory into ecstasy and release?

Next week, me and youngest are seeing Florence + the Machine at Climate Pledge Arena. The tickets were ridiculous, and neither of us are super-familiar with her work, though I’ve heard it a ton on KEXP. I’m going because I felt called to it. I’ve heard a few places that their concerts are like religious experiences, that people come out revitalized, changed.

I’m looking forward to the concert the way I look forward to the coming solstice and hoping to find home. I don’t know where it will be, and I don’t know who will choose to travel wherever I might go. I turn to music when I don’t know where else to go. Maybe it’s the closest thing I have to a religious observance.

I may start finding ways to include some Griefletter outtakes in the archive. I have a thousand words I wrote earlier this week that didn’t make it into this one. Then there’s the meta conversation I’m often having with myself when writing these that is as much a part of the grief process as this series.