Foraging for Joy

an essay for those that grieve today

Strudel’s sigh as he rests his head on my knee.

The raspberry bush my friend planted in my garden on Earth Day.

Judith’s fluffy tail feathers as she waddles around her coop.

***

I confirmed the loss of my first pregnancy on Easter.

I’d sensed something was wrong a week before, when the first faint positive had struggled to darken with each passing day. Good Friday sounded like the suctioning of blood as the lab tech took my sample without uttering a word. Holy Saturday forced me to sit in waiting for results. Easter Sunday came with shouts of “Hallelujah!” because of Christ’s victory over death and with tears because there was no victory for the baby in me.

***

A musical battle between Northern Cardinals and Carolina Wrens.

The scent of the season’s first honeysuckle filling my park.

A bouquet my friend had delivered whose blooms remained longer than they should.

***

I’d marveled at the beauty of this baby’s timing: conceived two days after Laetere Sunday and due just before Gaudete Sunday. It was a pregnancy that would have been bookended by the church’s celebration of joy. I’d received it as a small gesture of God’s love after 18 months of tracking and temping and trying and waiting and testing and hoping and waiting some more. After a decade of longing and wondering if I would ever have the chance to try.

When suspicions crept in that this pregnancy might not be viable, I clung to those days: Laetere, Gaudete. God couldn’t be so cruel, I thought, as to taunt me with then take away this joy.

***

The twitch of Strudel’s leg mid-snore, alerting me to a dream that must involve running after something good.

Dough bubbling up out of its container that will turn into loaves for my neighbors.

The mulberries dropping all across my lawn that I plan to bake into scones for a friend.

***

Two days into bleeding, I went to lunch on Duke’s campus with my weekly ballet companion. My emotions were on edge and my belly ached, but I didn’t want to miss the presentation by Matthew Rushing, associate artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. I’d had the privilege of participating in some workshops with Rushing earlier in the year as part of his artistic residency at Duke Divinity School, focused on the work of Negro spirituals and the healing power of movement.

As part of the lunch, he planned an exercise for all of us in attendance. He shouted out words and asked participants to form a movement to match. “Lament,” he began. “Perseverance,” he continued. Then finally, in a low voice, he stretched out the final word: “Joy”

We repeated the movements over and over: Lament. Perseverance. Lament. Perseverance. Lament…Joy. Perseverance...Joy. Lament. Perseverance…Joy.

I crouched down at the third lament and sobs overtook me. I couldn’t extend my arms in celebration on the next word.

***

The calluses on my feet that are thickening with each contemporary dance class I take.

The five-year-old down the road who told his mom, “We need to visit Kendall. She’s our very best friend.”

That same child’s excitement when he checks on the chickens and finds their freshly-laid eggs.

***

I spent the past year seeking ways to prevent grief from propelling me into depression. From the outside, it might have looked like a refusal to slow down—running, swimming, dancing in order to metabolize pain; going on date after date after date, giving almost anyone a chance; meeting with a midwife, a nutritionist, an acupuncturist, a spiritual director, a therapist, an ObGyn.

Maybe this was the newest iteration of my lifelong propensity to work too hard. I think, though, it was a determination to hold onto hope in any form I could. It was my best attempt at standing up against despair. As long as I could keep taking steps towards the family I desire, hope could stake a claim over the endless series of disappointments.

I feared this loss would be the final blow, that it would drain me of any remaining energy to press on.

“I feel like a child that wants to lay down in the middle of the sidewalk, too tired to walk the rest of the way home,” I told my therapist a week after the Matthew Rushing lunch.

“But I’m also the parent, too weak to pick the child up yet wise enough to know that if they don’t move, they’ll be run over by the next cyclist to whiz by.”

***

The steak frites I savored after someone who knows the physical toll of loss Venmoed me and told me to treat myself.

The texts and emails from colleagues, who took my next steps on my behalf. Like Aaron and Hur holding up Moses’ arms during battle with the Amalekites.

The perfectly timed song played live by the songwriter on the day I finally had the capacity to pray again:

Don’t you know that your Father in heaven
Knows just what you’re needing?
Don’t you see He loves you much more
Than the lilies and sparrows
Come and rest, don’t waste today
Being scared of tomorrow

***

The infuriating and remarkable thing about Gaudete and Laetere Sundays is that they come before the penitential seasons are over.

We celebrate on Gaudete Sunday, not because our longing has come to an end but because we need joy to carry us through Advent—to keep us going when Christmas feels so close yet so far away.

We celebrate on Laetere Sunday, because even before we reach the point of Christ’s resurrection, we need joy to pull us through the end of Lent. We need joy in order to survive the grief of Good Friday. We need joy in order to endure the Holy Saturday wait.

I’ll be the last person to tell you that in the midst of grief, you should simply look at all the things you have to be grateful for. Too often, this practice is used to bypass the ache of longing or loss. It taunts, “How dare you wince at your open wounds when you have so much else that is good?”

But as Shannan Martin writes in her new book Counterweights, we need heavy goodness to counter the heaviness of all that’s hard. She talks about the ways that, ironically, it is easier to carry a loaded bucket in each hand than it is to carry just one. If you’ve got a heavy bucket of grief, then you need a heavy bucket of goodness to pull your center of gravity back into place and allow you to move ahead.

In the first few weeks of Eastertide, when joy felt anything but natural, I began forcing myself to record each moment that a little sprout of it burst up through the dark. Like foraging for ramps or mushrooms, I couldn’t plant, cultivate, or harvest this joy—but I could keep my eyes open and take hold of life where I found it. In my pets, my yard, my neighbors, my friends.

This practice hasn’t washed away the grief. It still shows up at random points within my days. But the practice has nourished me just enough to stand up a little bit straighter, to take another step forward, to hope that maybe, just maybe, one day Advent and Lent will come to an end.