Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where every bend may reveal a totally new landscape. C.S.Lewis

I spot it at the tail end of my walk. A broken hair band? A slender bit of yellow string, formed into a heart with a tail on either side? I squat down for a better look, and in an instant, I feel you with me. Sending a message of love like the Anna’s hummingbird that came so close to my check, I thought it might kiss me.

Today is my eighth day in a row walking with Lucy, our tireless black lab-retriever mix. My Garmin tells me that nine days is my personal record, reached on January 1, 2024. The start of a year that held so much promise, only to collapse under the weight of my grief over the anniversary of your death on February 16^th. Ten years gone. An entire decade endured without you.

The gray cloud of that milestone pressed down on me for months afterward. I struggled to work, fought to stay focused, feel asleep at my desk in the late afternoons. It wasn’t until a dear friend refused to let the pain in my eyes go unnoticed that I found a way back to myself. The Five-Minute Journal she sent enabling me to rediscover my own inner knowing as well as those moments of sweetness I had stopped being able to see.

But now, looking back a year later, I realize I only returned halfway. Professionally, I grew. The struggles and disappointments. Launching a new initiative only to watch it fizzle out, despite my best efforts. Painful all, but so worth it when it came to revealing both the work I want to do and the humans I want to do it with. Without that clarity, I wouldn’t have had the courage to terminate my work with an uncoachable client. Or set firm boundaries with a lazy, passive-aggressive one. Good lessons all.

What got lost in the stress and strain was moving my body and escaping from whatever was pressing down on me in the moment. I’d log a few days in a row, then start skipping my walks and workouts in favor of getting an extra hour or two at my desk.

Reflecting back, I knew at some level that I was focusing on my mental health at the cost of my physical. Every time the New York Times ran an article on balance tests for older adults, I took them relieved to discover that I could still easily exceed the benchmark for my age group. I took note of upcoming 10K races and made vague plans to train for them. I downloaded movies on my iPad with the hope they’d inspire me to get on the treadmill.

The wake-up call came a month ago when I stood on our bathroom scale and discovered I was two pounds heavier than I’d ever been except when I was pregnant with Jimmy (forty pounds aren’t hard to put on when you’re eating two grilled cheese sandwiches a night …). I was heavier than I’d been in the sedentary weeks leading up to Jimmy’s death.

It wasn’t really the weight, though. It’s that I failed to notice what was happening in my own body. The number on the little screen was a shock, as though there had been some sort of mistake. Or as if the change had happened while I’d been out of town.

More than 30 years ago when Jimmy was learning to walk, my mother told me that babies tend to work on either walking or talking, but not both at the same time. The drive to take that first step will occupy every bit of their attention, even disrupting their sleep, so eager are they to be ambulatory.

It feels primal to find myself in a similar place. So intensely focused on my own learning I forgot I had a body. But just as babies travel their own paths in their own ways, life after loss follows its own course as we focus first on one thing, then another in order to survive.

*****

Lucy and I walked for fifteen days in a row before my schedule forced me to take a break. Long enough for me to feel the strength coming back into my legs as we motored up the hills near the house. Spring has been especially beautiful this year and full of surprises. Our resident bobcat catching a squirrel on the dirt incline behind our house. A two-day visit from a male peacock with a spectacular train of quill feathers who vanished as suddenly as he appeared. Poppies dotting the landscape and purple lupine blanketing the grassy knolls around the lake.

Every time I think I have grief figured out, I discover how much more I have to learn. Seeing time or milestones as signs that everything is permanently better is like thinking the horizon is the end of the ocean.

To paraphrase what Geraldine Brooks said about her dead husband in her gorgeous memoir, Memorial Days, my job is to carry Jimmy’s light. And I am never closer to him than when I am out in the world with a dog by my side finding signs and symbols of his love all around me.