August was rough on all of us.  Especially for my daughter, in ways she is aware of and in ways she has not yet come to understand. The story begins two days before her brother’s death day. A friend of Payton’s lost her brother, and then another friend lost his best friend. Payton found herself consoling each friend of the impacts of losing a brother to sudden death. She was strong, supportive and present for both and their respective families.

This was the catalyst of her angst. Grief arrived heavy. And angry. It was too much to bear, so close to the anniversary of her own loss. It birthed an intense desire to go over her own life and what she wants.  More importantly, what she needs. And the answers to her introspection are different than anything any of us had imagined.

She admits she is afraid. She has come to an intersection of many unknowns and that is scary. What she isn’t seeing yet, is the drive behind her, the reason why she wishes to move every aspect of what is to what might be. It is because of the past seven years.  The cyclical wreckage of holding it together and then falling apart. Her physical, emotional well being are nonexistent. Her soul is screaming, intuitively pushing her back onto a path she was derailed from when her brother was killed.

What she can’t clearly see is the love and the support of those around her to which will be her refuge when she awakens.  When the pain of her decisions softens, the current blindness to how deep her grief is will become clear.

As grief warriors, we sometimes fall into the trap that others expect of us. The “I should be better by now” stage. My daughter felt that she should be healed enough to be counsel to her friends, that her grief, after this long, should be in check with the expectations of her present life. Time allows us to become blind to our grief. Then, out of seemingly nowhere, it shakes us hard, reminding us that we are changed and insisting to examine if the changes fit into our current day.  It is a distinctive process of grief. It cannot be ignored.

That is where my daughter now finds herself. Intensified by the deaths of her friends’ brothers, her own grief has insisted that she see the areas that she needs to change. The necessity of shaping a more comfortable, loving space to live with all her losses.

Her reality is paused by her latest quest. Paying homage to a tattoo she has, “give me a lifetime of adventures”, she is enjoying a trip she planned to take seven years ago. Before her plans, all our plans were blown up. This trip is her need to revisit her life before grief took over. Her soul knows that the black sands under the northern lights will soothe her heart. As her mother, it is my hope that this trip will be the reset she needs to follow her true north, alongside the energy of those who guide her from above.