The Two Sides of Yellow

Photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash

...

For my mom.

Who is worth the spectrum of emotions. 

In losing you, I have been taught that it is okay, 

more than okay, vital even, and most importantly honest to feel and express more than happiness.

Sadness and Anger were reserved for other people, not me, I so believed.

But you had the bravery of both, and I envied you for it. 

Now, I continue in my journey to see more than one side.

 ...

"Yellow For My Grief"

 “What do you want your mom to be buried in?”

Yellow. The yellow dress. 

So many questions swirled in the air around me. 
I received only the dull edges of them.
In a fog so dense, I couldn’t move.
Nothing got through
Except yellow spilled out. 

“Will you speak at the funeral?”
“Do you want to write something for one of us to read for you?”
I was made of words. Until the day you lost yours.
Then they abandoned me.
Numbness carried me instead. 
Silence. Yellow, tingling, smiling silence - as we remembered you.

What kind of synesthesia is this?
I always thought it’d be red for you, my July Dream.
Yet, yellow shone through. 

I’m learning how many colors you were.
Some I knew.
Some have evolved from you, even after you’re gone.
Continuing in color. 

But Yellow for my grief?
Sweet Lord, how blessed could I be?
That when she went - she left me in yellow.

...

Excerpt from "Cycles of You"

My proximity to her allowed me to brush the cosmos, 

her joy was a contagious, dancing thing, 

and my smile was spirit deep beyond my twisted fibers.

My loss was oceanic, 

my pain ever searing like a burn, 

and my yellow smile - a jaundice of composure I felt forced into my whole life.

...

Each color had one dimension before my mom died. Now, color is a prism - ever faceted. Turn it again for another angle.

There are two sides, often more, with everything. There's an underbelly to it all. 

Every bit of sunshine I showed was true, but I'd hidden away dusk so it wouldn't be seen.

...

In A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis says, 

"Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will pain not to be pain..."

My supposed, forced 'device' Lewis speaks of was joy, perspective. My device was looking in at my silence on the weekend my mother died and calling it all yellow. I wanted so badly to do something more with pain than feel it. I wanted to dictate it, I wanted it to be useful. I wanted grief to be helpful, to be a brick in this house I've labored on. 

But what I needed to do was feel the anguish. All I could do was twist it into something else, or catch the glint of something lovely in my sorrow and zoom in on it so closely that it'd be all I could see. Yes, there was yellow. But you never really see 'Mourning Yellow' in a Crayon box. Yet, I'd argue that maybe you should. Because for all my shapeshifting and logic applied to pain, it always looked the same when I unraveled. I wanted to outsmart the whole charade, but all I can do with suffering is suffer it. My attempts to cut it off, only led to a more treacherous pursuit. 

I connected so much with "Yellow for My Grief" when I wrote it last year, but only shared it with a few people because I felt like it was easy to misunderstand. It was one of the more straightforward things I'd written on the topic, but it still felt like I omitted something. I meant that there was a warmth and a brightness I was given in the wake of my loss. It just somehow felt incomplete. Like I needed to follow up. For a while I wasn't sure how to express my heartache without feeling like I was discounting the beauty and joy I had been given in life through the person of my mother and countless other blessings. 

I started thinking through our human experience with sadness and how often it holds hands with bliss. And it was in that, I thought how things were never competing. They just had edges unseen. Maybe my yellow had another side. 

There I thought through all the panic yellow can bring. The medicinal quality. The haziness of it. It was then I wrote, "Cycles of You". In this I finally gave my sadness a size: the ocean. It was so simple, but it was rarely in my writings. I wrote and/or shared the size of my delight, my gratefulness for my mom: boundless, forever July. 

But I didn't zero in on how greatly I felt the pangs of her passing. "Cycles of You" helped me articulate to myself that if my love and happiness for my mom was all those horizons, all those warm, red sun soaked days - then my aching and sorrow got to be an ocean of tears, an unknown abyss of being tossed about without rest or water that would actually sustain you. There were two sides of the coin. More than one side to me. 

...

This was the other side of yellow. 

The one I kept quiet in pages like a secret. 

Because what do people want from yellow?

Sunlight.

Nothing else, I thought.

Nothing uncomfortable, nothing untidy.

I've thought for the last five plus years, 'this isn't me'.

I am no longer kind. Not without her.

My mom made it so easy to be kind. 

...

I equated being forthright about my sadness as being unkind or selfish.

And in a few settings perhaps it can be.

But it's not a flaw to have facets.

...

I deal in words, 

and like so many with the loss of someone beautiful inside and out, 

I have all this left over love.

So instead of pushing it into a tidy box,

I'm letting it have air.

In hopes that:

 It honors my mother for the long periods of time where all I remembered her by was silence and composure.

Sweet girl, you're worth it all. Even the untidy. 

Someone like me wouldn't confetti their emotions, but find healthy, safe ways to be present.

Take your time, there's no formula. We're rooting for you each time you get up.

For anyone, we've all experienced loss, give yourself the grace to call something sacred and sit at it's memory.

For whatever you mourn: Don't allow anyone to belittle or compare or measure your hurt.

...

Grief:

It is warmth to your spirit in moments without movement.

It is a memory flashed across your mind.

It is an empathy that when mirrored, is more profound and potent that I knew possible.

It is a look, a hug, an understanding that sees you in your dark, unmentionable corner.

It is more love than I know what to do with.

I am undeserving to carry it.

I will not water it down, or condense it to lessons I've learned. 

I didn't want to be convoluted or complex. 

I didn't want to let the cracks show.

But grief came for me, unrelenting.

And when I stopped choking on my composure, I finally unfurled my hands.

...

Here's to finding the courage of open hands in a world where even the sunniest yellow, has endured rain.