Healing from Grief

When I flew to Seattle for work, I lost the center stone of my ring at the airport. I really love my ring, and losing part of it made me feel hollow. I play with my ring a lot. I twist it when I’m bored and run my thumb over it when I feel nervous. Without the stone in the center, I found myself spinning it, searching for something that wasn’t there. When I could no longer handle the constant reminder that something was missing, I tucked it into a drawer. That’s when it hit me. I was grieving!

It felt silly at first to be missing something so seemingly small and insignificant, but I realized that big or small, we’re all grieving something. A missing stone. A lost relationship. A chance that slipped away.

Two months into my despair, something unexpected happened. I was digging through my laptop bag, checking for ants (you’ll see why in the next section), when I noticed a strange shape. It looked out of place. Even when I saw it clearly, I couldn’t quite make sense of it. Then it hit me. It was the stone I thought I lost at the airport.

Could the hollow places be hopeful spaces?

It was in my laptop bag all along, somehow making it through sixty days of zipping and unzipping. As the realization settled, I felt the weight of that tender mercy, that quiet reminder as I fingered the stone: even if it takes more time than we like, someday, every grief we carry will be healed. The emptiness in our hearts will be filled.

That small, found stone reminded me that even if our healing isn’t always immediate or linear, it is always happening. Even in the small things.