Wild Strawberries
grief and gifts
Today was for the wild strawberries. For tiny hands, seeking and searching and harvesting the tiny tender bursts. Love, direct from the Earth. We did not plant this bounty, yet we revel in it. A relationship of which we know too little. To be given, without tending or fostering. A true gift, freely given.
The strawberries only last about as long as it takes from the ground to your mouth. Too long in your clutched palm and they melt, turning to jam before your eyes. In a bowl, they wilt and wither. Seeking hydration and finding none, they begin their collapse to the air. Today was the day to find the balance between jam and air, to find sweet juicy bits that hid and we sought, to be in liminal space…a space I seek fervently these days.
I’d like to tell you a story. It begins when I was 18 months old. My little brother was born. My life begins then. It’s when my memories start. It’s when I begin to know myself in relationship with others, and differentiate myself from the warm, cocoon embrace of my mother’s belly, her breast.
We spend childhood together, safe and secure. Full and satiated. It was idyllic: cul-de-sac kickball games, our mother ringing a bell to signal us to come home at dark or dusk or dinner. We traveled. We ate. We lived in the woods outside our house, me and my brother just two creatures ripe with earth and love and play.
We grew up. Addiction ravaged our family. What we knew was safe and love and life, burned a bright fireball of reckless abandonment. We clung to each other. My brother and me. We circled each other. I moved, he followed. Through stages, and coasts, and even more heartbreak. He was always my rock. My heart.
We watched our parents burn, one at a time. We stood sentinel, caregiver, flung wildly from our own lives back to darkness, always looking to each other for the light, the way.
He grew to be a man full of magic. Of tenderness. He was a healer and a lover. An artist and a writer. A man who worshipped his human body with honor and reverence, like a prayer to the earth. A soul who traveled in dreams, in hearts, in art.
He was ASTONISHING.
In February this year he died, inexplicably and unexpectedly. My heart. Much of my heart went with him. I am back in the space of being flung wildly from the known and looking for him, the light, the way.
When he died, I shepherded my broken parents on flights to reach his body, his rented apartment at a job he was working on in another state. I took two books and gave away the rest of his meager possessions. He wasn’t there. This collection of things was not him, but I wanted to take something he touched, something that he traveled with across his nomadic life.
I took a book, In the Fullness of Time by Neghar Fonooni. Weeks later I opened it. A message, clear and crystalline. Marked with a Jack of Hearts on “A Liminal Space”. He spoke to me, he found me and I him.
So I meet him in doorways now, looking for keys. I will always meet him in doorways.
My grief is anger. This feels unfair and tragic. I want more.
My grief is sadness. My kids are young, and will only have glimpses of memories of him. I will be an old lady, bereft of a brother.
My grief is love. I get him. I choose to have a relationship with my grief because it means I get to have a relationship with him.
This morning I woke to a fledging release of a video. The last project he was immersed in when he died. I sobbed, my kids in my arms. We gathered ourselves, the strawberries calling to us.
In the past 4 months I’ve found truths and light, darkness and liminal space. Strawberries its newest face.
His name was Tyler James Wall. He was my best friend. I am getting to know him in shadows, in doorways, in strawberries, in ethereal energy now. I know he is not lost to me, and most days I believe it.1
