Nostalgia is just grief
and I am riddled with the feeling
The end of the year always has me feeling nostalgic to the point of grief. Life moves at such a pace that as soon as I feel like I am beginning to get the hang of it, everything changes. My siblings are off raising their own families as soon as I realize the blessing of having them around. Every holiday season I wonder how many I will have left laughing, cooking, and eating with my parents. And my career has hardly ever given me enough time to catch my breath.
I watched my husband over my shoulder last night as I stood over a sink filled with dishes from the lentils and curry we had just eaten. Feeling the swiftness of the years, I wanted the warm water and the soap to wash the grief from my hands. Just yesterday we were kids in our twenties, falling in love on the other side of the world, and today we are married, figuring out how to live like married couples do, our friends are having kids and I could not tell you where the time went. Years passed in the blink of an eye, and the days show no signs of slowing. Knowing this wrecks me. It’s like falling in love with a shooting star, it is already a memory by the time we register what’s happened. But none of this seems to scare him.
“I feel like in my thirties I am just now starting to figure out what my life is about.” he says.
“And what’s that? What is your life about?” I turn from the dishes to face him and the whole house goes quiet under those warm kitchen lights. The flowers on the table, the pots, the pans, the shoes neatly lined up by the door, everything looks at him and holds it’s breath.
“Love. My life is about love.”
My husband is an angel and I truly don’t deserve him. His answer is sweet. And as much as I want it to satisfy the ache of my nostalgic grief I need an answer. I need something to do with this awareness of brevity and mortality. Because if I am being honest, knowing there is an end date to all this love, somewhere out in an uncertain future, makes the passing of time all the more heavy. So I keep prying and keep digging.
“What about death? What about dying? How does that figure into your equation?”
He pauses, raises an eyebrow and even the wind outside the house stills, before he responds again, this time with some finality.
“How should I know that? I have never been dead before.” His face bends into a smile. “So when I am, I will know.”
This got a chuckle out of me. His ability to simplify rivals my ability to overcomplicate things. But when he broke wind a moment later I laughed fully out loud and yelled that I couldn’t have these philosophical discussions with him if he was going to gas the place. To which he shrugged and told me he just, “had to keep it real.”
It was unexpected enough to break my thought loop and I ended up crumpled on the couch laughing so hard at the insanity of the situation my sides hurt.
Sometimes you don’t get to have nice neat answers. In truth, it was probably naive of me to think I would solve the problem of mortality in the middle of doing dishes. We don’t get to think our way out of feeling. All this nostalgia is really just grief, and all this grief is really just an echo that is left by love. Fingerprints left inside the walls and chambers of our heart. Proof that something beautiful came through like a wild wind and left our world bigger than before.
We rarely reach the bottom of our questions. Rarely do we have the privilege of glimpsing what our life and our time is for. But in the flurry of our days there is love, our humble (awkward, gassy, anxious, and brilliant) humanity, and there is joy. And these are enough to sustain us. They keep life going even in the face of all sadness and uncertainty.
When it comes to our nostalgia and our grief, we cannot think our way out of a heart problem. We can only learn to sit at the table and hold hands with the mystery. We lean into our loved ones while they are here and pray it is enough. And if we are lucky, we one day find that it is. We love hard. As hard as we possibly can stand it. We touch our corner of the universe with all the tenderness we can muster, and in the end our grief becomes our proof. Our proof of a life well lived, and more importantly, our proof of a life well loved.
Stay tender and stay true lovebugs,
Dakota
I remember reading somewhere that nostaligia was once considered mental illness. No longer. But nostalgia as grief . . . that I believe wholeheartedly.