grief – Sarah Bahiraei

“It’s because we don’t have a rocking chair,” I hiss at my husband, my voice coming out louder and meaner than I had intended. I turn my body away from him, declining any help to get our 7 month old back to sleep, the martyr complex in me going strong since 4:30 that morning. I’m fully aware the correlation doesn’t make any sense. The presence of a rocking chair next to her crib isn’t going to make her sleep perfectly through the night, but it’s the easiest and closest target for me to aim my frustration.

But not having a rocking chair is a symbol of the temporary state my husband, baby, and I are in. It’s a symbol of the things we’ve lost.

Since completing another (and hopefully final) security interview last fall, my husband’s immigration case has been pushed into something called “administrative processing”, a black hole for immigrants from banned countries listed under the Trump Administration’s travel ban. Between a plexiglass window, the officer sympathized but explained he had no control over the interview’s outcome. “It’s an order from Washington,” he had shrugged, pushing back our thick folder of official documents, wedding photos, and relationship affidavits while motioning for the next person in line.

As the swearing-in of a new administration inched closer, and with it, the promise of an immigration overhaul starting on day one, we continued to live in the short-term through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year. It didn’t make sense to spend money on a new—and expensive and hard to find in Turkey—piece of furniture when, at any point, my husband may receive his visa to enter the U.S.

When we live in temporary permanence, it doesn’t make sense to buy a rocking chair or a bedside bassinet or deck out a nursery. It doesn’t make sense to spring for the fancy convertible car seat or to give the walls a fresh coat of paint. There’s the always-present possibility we’ll be leaving soon. Why waste the money now when we can use it in the U.S.? But as time marches forward and the calendar flips to another month and then another, we find ourselves wishing for that rocking chair, blaming the baby’s lack of sleep on its absence. It may seem like a silly thing to grieve over, but it highlights the things we’ve had to give up over the last four years.

There’s a term that’s been thrown around since entering into a worldwide pandemic called “ambiguous loss”, meaning any loss coming from an outside situation that is unclear and provides no closure. To varying degrees, we are all experiencing loss from the upset of what was once our regular routines. From the loss of jobs and loss of cultural celebrations and rituals to loss of relationships over politics and loss of dreams, we are all grappling with how to move forward when we are still in the middle of uncertainty. It is also important to note that for many of us, there is tangible loss as well. As the U.S. surpasses 400,000 COVID-19 deaths (my own family mourning the loss of a family member passing earlier this week), there is real grief to process. Like my husband’s immigration case, there is no finite ending to this, no timeline to follow.

One day short of a week into 2021, I looked at my phone to see a text from my mom telling me I should be watching the news right now. So we peeled ourselves out of bed, pushing the heavy quilt aside, and made our way to the living room, careful not to wake the baby who was (miraculously) sleeping deep that night. We scrolled our phones and looked on in horror as white supremacy stormed the Capitol. We were fearful but not shocked at the state of our country, sadden but not surprised at the state of the American church and its response.

Yesterday, over a carton of ice cream, we watched the Presidential Inauguration. I had apologized for my embarrassing outburst from earlier that morning, felt guilty for acting that way in front of our daughter, snuggled her for much longer than usual when putting her to bed, and curled up to my husband on the couch before diving into the pistachio ice cream. We woke up this morning with the news that the travel ban that was put into place four years ago was finally overturned. Many Iranians flooded the message boards with questions and speculations as to what will happen in the coming months. My husband and I speculate too. We allow ourselves to dream a little.

As a new president steps in, so many of us breathe a collective sigh of relief. Perhaps change is coming. Perhaps there is light. Perhaps there is hope.

When living in ambiguous grief, I don’t know what the proper ways are to deal with it. I’m sure there are articles and papers written by people much smarter than me that outline just that. If I had known we would still be living in Turkey after four years, I don’t know if I would have done anything differently. Maybe we would have bought a bassinet and the fancy car seat, but maybe not.

If you’re grappling with unnamed loss over this past year and feel like the world is on fire, then we are right there with you. Buy that rocking chair, or don’t. But all I can say is be sure to dive into a carton of ice cream and maybe not yell at your husband.

I’ll end with this lovely new year benediction from Author Sarah Bessey:

“May the God of compassion and open doors, be with us this coming year.
Everything sad won’t come untrue this year and this year will hold its own tragedies and sorrows. We’ll relearn lament and fight for joy. May we show up with courage and faithfulness for our lives and our callings and our people. May we be restored and renewed even in exile. May the wilderness become our cathedral and our altar.
May we say good-bye to the things that do not serve us – the selfishness, the fear, the illusions of control, the bitterness, the doom-scrolling, the self-pity, the martyr complex, the us-and-them fire stokers – and say hello to wisdom, to kindness, to justice, curiosity, wonder, goodness, generosity, possibility, peace making.
May we throw open the doors of our lives to the disruptive, wild, healing Holy Spirit. May this be a year of unclenched hands and new songs, of vaccines and reunions, of good food and some laughter, of kind endings and new beginnings. May we be given a mustard seed of faith, it will be enough to notice and name what you love in particular about your life as it stands.
May 2021 bring you goodness and courage, hope and love, resilience and a hand to hold even on the nights with no stars”

Even when we find ourselves grieving over rocking chairs.

—

Photo by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

If you ever come to our home, you’ll probably be greeted with a cup of tea no matter the season. Admittedly, not by me—I’m still learning the art of tea-making—but by my husband. And don’t expect the instant tea-bag-dunked-in-hot-water kind. No, you will be given slowed-brewed Persian chai—black tea leaves with hints of cinnamon and cardamom, steeped all morning over a low open flame on the stove.

And there might be a chance you’ll reach into the kitchen cabinet for a glass and unknowingly grab the red mug. It’s a small, stout ceramic cup, half-submerged in vermillion red paint, half left as natural clay. We have a green and blue one too. They’re handmade by a Turkish potter, getting his clay from the river running through our town, spinning them on his wheel and firing them in his kiln down the street.

But the red mug? That’s our good luck mug.

It’s called that not because it mystically brings years of good fortune and success to the drinker (at least not that we know of). It’s not because it’s pretty and unique—and it is, made locally and one-of-a-kind. There isn’t one like it. Even its siblings who sit quietly in a row on the store shelf all look slightly different from each other upon closer inspection.

It’s called our good luck mug because it has cracks—actually, a lot of cracks. Actually, the handle has been broken off and glued back together three different times in four different places. There are thick clumps of dried superglue oozing out of the broken areas and little paint chips sprinkled around the rim. ‘Good luck’ in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way because the glued-on handle has, on more than one occasion, slowly and melodramatically separated from the rest of the mug while in use.

Life holds a lot of cracks, doesn’t it?

Our miserable-looking mug, in all its fractures and pitiful glue attempts, brings to mind the stories of grief we all carry, how life has the power to crack us wide open. I have yet to meet someone who isn’t shouldering a rucksack of grief—past or present, big or small, seen or hidden. At the moment, we are all living in the same state of cracks as we experience a global pandemic, and with that brings in worry for high-risk loved ones, disappointment from canceled plans, and the loss of any sense of normalcy.

My husband and I have experienced ongoing grief before; this feeling isn’t new to us. It wasn’t just one defining moment or one break down the middle, but a series of blows and burials of dreams. We haven’t seen much come to fruition, or at least not many prayers answered in ways we had hoped. Any appearance of control we thought we possessed has been jostled out of our hands. Add on to that a pandemic, living in a foreign country, and the upcoming birth of our first child and our stress has been turned up one too many notches.

On a macro-level, we are all enduring the world turning upside down. And with that, there’s been a lot of online content lately written by well-meaning people who are trying to be encouraging during this time of heightened uncertainty. In a benevolent effort to ease the discomfort of quarantine and social distancing, there has been a flood of to-do lists, checklists, advice, and examples of productive routines infiltrating our inboxes. Get up early, exercise every day, bake bread, organize the junk drawer, write letters, zoom in meetings, get creative, be grateful, find a new normal.

But coming from someone who has had prolonged uncertainty as a constant sidekick for the past three years, let me be the first to tell you that you don’t have to do any of that. It’s too much pressure when the world feels a little too shaky. When tomorrow is shadowed in the unknown, sometimes we need to survive before we think about thriving. Often, it is more essential to acknowledge how we feel for a little awhile before we choose all the “shoulds” thrown our way.

This grief—a crack on the handle here, a chip around the rim there—can teach us the importance of holding space. In her book, The Broken Way, Ann Voskamp suggests, “Maybe wholeness is embracing brokenness as part of your life.” And when life throws a curveball, like an outbreak of a novel virus, we hold on to hope, which cannot be held on to without a few cracks. Grief, cracks, wholeness, and hope. They’re the ingredients to a recipe for fertile and holy ground. Welcome it.

If your good luck mug has cracks like mine—perhaps from the strange state of the world or from something else entirely—hold space for it. Don’t take sandpaper to it and buff out the discomfort by way of routines and productivity just yet. Identify the grief you’re feeling. Look for the growth among the cracks. Doing so can make way for wholeness. Joy and grief can be felt simultaneously. Imperfections and beauty can live side-by-side. And know this: the cracks are not fragile despite their appearance. They are being held together tightly by the Potter, the one who created the mug, the one who sees, who resurrects, who makes all things new.

When life feels unresolved and the threads of simply being are left untied, come to our house—you’ll be in like-minded company. Pull up the comfy chair, the one over there in the corner with the throw pillows. We’ll offer you that good, Middle Eastern chai. Choose the ramshackle cup with the crimson red paint and embrace both the defects and beauty. Hold space for grief in this time of uncertainty. Trust that the cracks will lead to light.

And, while I cannot prove this for sure, I’m almost certain everything tastes just a little bit better and a little bit sweeter in that good luck mug.

Tag: grief

Rocking Chair Grief

The Good Luck Mug