The Mending Word: Closing Sessions
Is it weird to start the first post on this new blog about a closing session in The Mending Word series? Kind of like how some people like to know how the book ends before reading it..yes, I’m guilty, at times. Well, if your here browsing through and curious about The Mending Word series, here is a writing I wrote based off tonight’s closing session prompt. And, it’s unfinished. But my motto is to jump right in before waiting for it to be “finished” or many things won’t even get started..
6.27.2023
It’s been a while since I did these prompts again. I’m always so focused on facilitating the groups, it’s easy to forget why I started this journey to begin with - for my own grief. I’m not only the facilitator but an active member - just a young woman grieving her parents every day. Her wonderful, beautiful, warm and loving parents.
What would I say to my past self? Don’t stop hugging them. Don’t run away from them, stop bothering to chase after things - money, jobs, friends - yeah, they’ll still be here, you’ll still be chasing them or integrating them into your life but you’ll never get this time back with your aging parents. And you’ll never stop regretting the time lost and you’ll never stop wishing for more. I miss them so much. What can I tell you? A young 22 year old girl, a whole life ahead of her, a clean slate, a safe home, and yet filled with so much constant anxiety about the future. And I’m from the future here to tell you that sorry, but none of your “big plans” and anxieties actually helped, because Covid doesn’t care about the research internships you had planned and the summer programs in the hospital that you worked so hard to get accepted into, and Cancer doesn’t care about your plans to live internationally or go to graduate school, Cancer only cares to rip your mom away from you forever.
So listen. You plan and plan and plan and yet - all fails. Not all, but most - especially those “in the future, for the future” ones. And the only thing that you’re left stuck with is, me. Yourself.
I know that you keep on running and that you’ll continue to be this way with no pause because I’m still doing it. Even as I plead with your past self to slow down, take a breath, enjoy the time with your cherished parents, I’m not listening to my own cautions, not even in this moment as I’m writing during a closing session late in the evening and I’m planning the next ones even though I spend 10+ hours at a job and say I don’t have time to work out or eat healthy and yet here I am filling up my waking hours with more and more lists of things I have to do.
So maybe as I sit here and reflect on my past self, my past self is really urging my present self to listen to what i’m saying. To not just write but to take action from these thoughts I have formulating into words here..to remind myself to be gentle, to breathe, to be less anxious (right, like that will help?) but to be more mindful and to practice what I “preach.” Enjoying the time that seems to rush by more and more every day.