I keep my sorrow in a Box of Rain. Sometimes the lid pops off and I get caught in a down pour. I run and grab my pink umbrella until it slows down enough that I can put it back into its box.
The box is shining silver, like the clouds of a thunderstorm when lit by crackles of lightning.
My Box of Rain is a luminous realm where tears and sorrow are welcomed with open arms.
It’s been almost two years since I got the call that threw my world off it’s axis that October morning. Jen called, “Can you talk?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m just sitting down by the fire with a cup of tea to write.”
She took a breath and said quietly, “She’s still alive.”
From some deep well in me, a whisper came out that grew to a deep moaning scream, “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!”
She wasn’t still alive. She was on a ventilator at the hospital in Pasadena with everyone around hoping for a miracle that didn’t happen.
A year earlier, my world had tilted on its axis when my father died of cancer and my husband abandoned our family to his addiction.
I was already deeply grieving the loss of my father and my husband. And now my best friend? It didn’t seem possible.
It still doesn’t seem real.
Sometimes I can’t see the light at all, living in my very own box of darkness.
Yesterday I slid into an actual box of darkness.
I had an MRI on my incredibly painful hips. The MRI Technician was gentle, funny, and reassuring. He put a pair of headphones playing classical music over my ears and played a video of panda bears eating bamboo for me.
I closed my eyes and tried not to imagine I was encased in a coffin-like tube with the ceiling two inches from my nose. Tears streamed down my face and would have pooled in my ears if I wasn’t wearing ear plugs and enormous headphones to drown out the knocking of the machine.
Terrible thoughts took advantage of my stillness and stormed my mind. “She’s holding still for a moment! Time to storm her mind castle!”
The voices said things like, “What’s the point? Why are you still here? There’s so much pain, so much loss. Your biggest cheerleader, your father is gone. Your husband didn’t want you. Your best friend is gone.”
Sideways tears activate something in me and make me want me want to go home. I want to get in my car and hit the open road and drive to my parents, to be enfolded in their warm arms. I want to hear them bickering about John Wayne and hear my Mom cheer for herself because she put a puzzle piece into the right spot. She kept Junior Mints next to her during puzzle time so she could reward herself when she fit a piece. I want to hear my Dad making his famous eggs and toast in the kitchen and yelling at all of us for not moving faster to the table. I want to smell his cologne and hear his navy stories for the millionth time.
But I can’t. He’s gone. And my Mom is in a Memory Care home with only fragments of her mind left.
From inside the box of darkness, I heard Glennon Doyle’s words on grief: “Find your way, no sudden movements, become comfortable with discomfort.” Well there would be no sudden movements inside this box. I held very still and wondered what they could see inside my body. Would they be able to see the pieces of my heart floating around in there? What does a crushed and grieving soul look like in magnetic imagery?
Mary Oliver wrote a poem called “The Uses of Sorrow.”
“Someone I loved once gave me a box of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.”
When I used to volunteer at Caring for Babies with AIDS, I would read a book called “To Heal Again” and one of the last lines said, “Now is the time of your winter. It will reveal it’s own perfect gift to you in its own perfect time.”
I don’t want to hear about the gifts of pain and darkness, but it recently dawned on me that maybe the point of it all, and I’m not saying there is one, but if there was, perhaps it’s about finding our inner light no matter what life throws at us, a light so strong and bright that nothing can snuff it out. Maybe it doesn’t matter how brutal and agonizing the world can be. Maybe it’s about cultivating kindness in the face of cruelty; humility in the face of egotistical tyrants; compassion in world that tells you that only the strongest survive.
Maybe the gift is understanding. Before the great losses, I was compassionate, but I didn’t understand deep in my soul what it meant to lose so many. Now I do. When I hear others crying out in pain, I can say, “You’re not alone. I’m in pain too.”
The Grateful Dead wrote a song about it called “Box of Rain.” Phil Lesh wrote it when his father was dying of cancer. I remember being at a Dead show at the Oakland Coliseum with Kim and our tall handsome friend, Trevor. Trevor was feeling a little worried about the world, sometimes a stadium full of people on magic mushrooms can do that to a person, and Kim and I stood in front of him during “Box of Rain” and sang it to him. “It’s just a Box of Rain, I don’t know who put it there…”
I don’t know if we helped Trevor, but I do remember that as we sang to him, something about the music and the imagery of the box, gave me a flash of understanding, that life is fleeting and love is always the thing that gets us through.
“…What do you want me to do, to do for you, to see you through?
Maybe you’re tired and broken
Your tongue is twisted with words half spoken and thoughts unclear.
A box of rain will ease the pain and love will see you through…”
