I wrote a short blog earlier today but then this evening I went out to the hot tub. There’s something about being out there in the dark in hot water, that allows my subconscious to float freely, with thoughts that won’t leave me alone until I rush inside and, dripping, write.

Especially this evening when the dark is cool and damp and smells of the transition to fall, and rain clouds sift across a full moon.

So here I now sit, dripping and thinking of my friends.

One who recently lost her mother. One who lost her son a year and a half ago. One who lost her daughter a year ago. Of another who lost her brother a short few months ago. And I thought of my siblings, we five orphans, who lost our parents years ago.

There’s that horrible old adage that time heals all, but everyone knows that’s not true. No matter what you’re grieving. The death of a loved one. A cancer diagnosis. The loss of a pet. So very, very many things that cut our hearts.

I think what time does, is leave that wound of grief deep and bleeding and raw without any healing at all.

But what time also does is allow us to be distracted. To get caught up in our daily lives, to slowly move. Not move past the loss. Certainly not move beyond that grief. But to simply move with the flow of life. Jobs and responsibilities and mundane things like what to fix for dinner, or the need to pick up mail. To move with the life that pulls us along with love and laughter.

We find ourselves happy. Maybe with guilt, maybe not joyful, maybe not even content. But still within moments where we surprise ourselves with feeling at peace, somehow.

Obviously the wound is carried with us in those moments of living life and moving on, because, really, we never move on. Even as we go through our daily lives and find that happiness, we’re still partially stuck, back in that moment when life changed.

Or when life ended.

That doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate life. We do. Maybe even more so when we’ve lost someone. Not all of us, of course. That’s the harder, darker side of grieving that I’m not thinking about this evening, although there are people I care about who have been in those shadowy spaces.

I’m just thinking about how we move with the tide of life, slip back into that flow, let time tug us along like an undertow. And how we get caught back up in that current.

Even if we bring along the weight of a wound that never fully heals.