In January last year, I looked at the previous year and said, “gosh, that was hard.” I looked ahead to the year to come and thought about all the ways that it was going to be better: I had great plans for fresh, life-giving rhythms for my self, my work, and my family. Perhaps I should have been forewarned by the words that God gave me for the year, “this is what we’ve got to work with.” Maybe I thought I’d learnt enough about limits for now, and that I was just going to learn to live within what I had already discovered.

But in February we realised how sick my mum really was. Her “barely a cancer” cerebellar tumour was affecting way more than her balance, in ways the neurosurgeon couldn’t explain. She lost her words, she lost her peace, she lost her will to live, and in early May we lost her.

Near the end of June I was starting to feel the ground beneath my feet again, when my dad had “news.” Something suspicious had popped up on his liver. Eventually we realised it wasn’t the prostate cancer we already knew about, instead it was likely a metastatic melanoma staging a takeover of his internal organs and bones. Optimistic as always, he struggled to face his own mortality, but, even stoic as he was, he couldn’t ignore the pain. In November we sat with vigil with him as he passed, just two doors down from where my mother had died six months earlier.

It was not a better year.

In the midst of all this I had Mary Oliver’s poem Hurricane in mind, particularly this line,

“The back of the hand to everything”

Everything.

Grief doesn’t stay in containers.

I learned invaluable lessons about what it actually feels like to have your weakness held in community – not just in theory but in experience, in my experience. For all that I am immensely grateful; I could not have grown forward in this, an area that threatens to derail me, without my personal hurricane year. But oh how I wish I could just learn the lessons, mine the gold, recover, heal, and move forward.

Yes, I see signs of new leaves being pushed out from my stubbed limbs (to borrow Mary Oliver’s language) – I wear my mother’s dress and finish my father’s crosswords and feel connected with them; I’m learning to throw pottery and enjoying feeling inexpert; I laugh as often as I cry.

But also I feel formless and without boundaries. For me, right now, this is the most enduring experience of grief. In part it’s due to losing my parents, those foundation stones of the self and a constant referent. More than this, however, I feel this inability to hold myself together. I’m the kind of person who usually has a tight hold on my sense of self; there’s an intentionality to everything, the question is always “is this who I want to be?”. High standards, yes; inner critic, yes; enneagram 1, for sure.

This ongoing crisis has taken the learning on weakness and limits another step deeper, to a more internal space. I’ve written previously about the limits of our power in the world (here) and of our inability to tell a story that makes sense of our lives (here). The learning for me now lies in the stark realisation of the limits of my ability to hold myself together as a person. Power in the world is one thing, power in yourself is another.

Unboundaried and formless, I am poured out like water; my heart unable to hold itself together.

But, poured out like water, I am poured upon the ground of God’s grace.

He absorbs me wholly into himself.

He drinks me in.

In this space I see again what it means to be the Beloved of Christ. This is not merely a descriptor of God’s affection towards me, that I have a special place in his heart, but the ground of my being. It’s not merely that I don’t need to bring anything to the table when we negotiate my acceptability, I do not even need to hold myself together at the table, I can be poured out upon it.

As much as I would like to recover, however slowly, from this state, I sense an invitation to relax into some degree of it. That feels dangerous. After all, if I’m not holding myself tightly, how will I know if I’m doing OK, how will I know if I’m good?

For some of you those sound like strange questions; for others of us, they provide the shape to our lives and our being in the world. Well, they try to, but they always fail. And, if anything, this hurricane season in my life and its aftermath in my heart have revealed the inability of those questions to say anything that matters about who I really am. I intuitively scrabble to take hold of them again in order to reassure myself about my self, but I know more deeply that my true being is hidden in Christ with God and that this self-emptying is the way to enter into this more fully.

Would have been nice if I could have chosen it for myself rather than collapsed into it, but I know I never would. God’s kindness is hidden in unlikely places.