Grief
Naming What Came
I think I’d like to write about something I experienced yesterday.
Something important to recognize…to name…to process…and to share.
Yesterday would have been my brother’s birthday.
My only sibling.
He would have been 68.
I woke up thinking about him.
Not deeply…just a passing thought.
And then I did what I do every morning.
Thank you, God, for another day of sobriety.
Thank you for allowing me to serve my community.
Thank you for another day of life.
When It Doesn’t Pass
But as the day went on, something shifted.
My brother stayed with me.
He tugged at my heart in a way I couldn’t ignore.
There was dough to make for market.
Work to be done.
But no matter how much I tried to move through the day…
I could feel him.
If I’ve learned anything over the past few years, it’s this:
I cannot push feelings away.
I have to acknowledge them.
Name them.
Say them out loud.
And walk through them.
So I asked God to help me.
And He did.
What the Dough Taught Me
It happened in the dough.
Fourteen hours of mixing, folding, shaping.
Fourteen hours with my hands in something living…
and my heart holding something that wasn’t.
And somewhere in that rhythm…
I understood something I’ve been learning, slowly, over the past year.
Grief does not go away.
It doesn’t disappear with time or soften into something neat and contained.
It remains.
But it changes shape.
And when we allow it—when we don’t run from it, when we don’t try to silence it—
it begins to move.
Through us.
Not to break us…
but to open us.
Who He Was
My brother was three years older than me.
A gentle soul who never hurt another human being.
He was a free spirit.
Creative.
Caring.
Funny.
We laughed constantly when we were together.
He was a dancer.
An incredible athlete.
We shared a love of horses and being in nature.
He loved his friends fiercely.
He would give his last dime to someone in need.
And in all the years I knew him, I never heard him say an unkind word about another person.
He was also gay.
And he was a victim of AIDS.
His ending was not something any of us expected.
But that is not where I choose to stay.
I choose to remember who he was.
What Do We Do With the Love?
For fourteen hours yesterday, I worked the dough…
and carried him with me.
And somewhere between the folds and the shaping, I found myself asking a question I’ve carried for a long time:
What do we do with the love we have for someone who is no longer here?
Because we don’t stop loving them.
That doesn’t end.
So where does it go?
What I Am Learning
What I am learning…slowly, and sometimes painfully…is this:
We don’t get over the loss of someone we loved deeply.
We learn how to live with it.
And maybe more than that…
we learn how to carry that love forward.
To place it somewhere.
To give it expression.
To let it move through us in a way that still reaches others.
Through Service
For me, that place has become this work.
The bread.
The hands in the dough.
The people at the table.
Stepping outside of myself…even when my heart feels heavy…
and serving someone else.
Offering something simple.
Something made with care.
And in doing that…
something begins to shift.
Not all at once.
But enough.
Enough to feel a little lighter.
Enough to feel connected again.
Enough to know that the love I carry for him did not disappear.
Woven In
Yesterday, that love was woven into every loaf.
Not in a way anyone could see.
But in a way I could feel.
And maybe that’s what this is.
Grief…
faith…
service…
All finding a place to meet.
And Maybe…
Maybe, if we are willing to stay with it…
If we are willing to feel it instead of run from it…
If we are willing to place that love somewhere…
It doesn’t just stay inside of us.
It becomes something we can give.
Warmly~
Kathy
Art of The Crumb