It’s Okay To Grieve It All - A Message For The Heavy Hearted

Hope Infusion Newsletter - January 19, 2025

Dear Hope Infusion Family,

Over the past few days, we've explored grief through a series of impromptu reflections. Your responses have been a testament to how many of us are carrying heavy hearts in these tumultuous times.

Today, we dive deeper into a truth that feels especially vital as we stand at the crossroads of personal and collective grief.

Whether we're mourning democracy's crumbling façade, watching wildfires consume California, witnessing the ongoing devastation in Western Carolina, or simply trying to breathe through our own private sorrow – every tear has meaning, every ache deserves acknowledgment.

What follows is a story about learning this lesson from someone who knew this truth in her bones...

"The pain is so intense at times that I can barely breathe, and the pain meds aren't working. Sometimes I just lay here crying and begging God to make it stop." – This was the agonized lament of a friend battling stage 4 cancer and suffering excruciating bouts of pain.

Her oncology team said it was nerve pain which is unique in intensity and particularly difficult to mitigate.

I didn't fully understand the medical "why" of it, but my heart broke over the "what" of it. And the "what" was daily encounters with physical torment from which pain medications offered no respite.

Comfort sometimes lies NOT in providing the hurting with answers, but in offering an ear to listen, a shoulder to cry on, a heart to understand. Frustrated by my inability to provide relief for the physical suffering---I offered the only comfort I could, that of presence.

During this time, I was diagnosed with fibroid tumors for which my doctor ordered a biopsy to rule out malignancy. It was negative. I breathed a sigh of relief, but kept silent and didn't update my friend.

Why? Because it felt unfair. Why had fate dealt her the losing hand of stage 4 cancer, and dealt me benign tumors with a side of minor discomfort?

Why was the stopwatch of her life swiftly ticking down to the final buzzer while I seemed to register plenty of time still on the clock? We were both mothers of young children, both women of faith, and there was only a year's difference in our ages.

Life rarely offers tidy explanations for its inequities. My friend, though, grasped these complexities with a wisdom that transcended my philosophical wrestlings. She was a lighthouse cutting through the fog of my guilt-ridden silence.

She eventually gave voice to that which I left unspoken and inquired about my biopsy.

I fumbled through a guilt-laden explanation and received, a response that was loving in tone, and profound in its wisdom:

"You don't have to hide your news because my outcome was different. You don't have to minimize the pain of fibroids because it's not as severe as mine from cancer. Pain is pain. Trauma is trauma. If it's upsetting to you, it's upsetting. It's not a competition."

That was her long answer. Here is the short one: "It's okay NOT to be Okay."

Period. Full Stop.

Her words echo with renewed urgency as I observe the mounting anxiety rippling through marginalized communities – including my own as a Black woman in the South.

Above the roar of political vitriol, I hear her whisper: “It's okay to grieve ALL of it. This is not the Grief Olympics. There is no gold medal for most profound grief story.”

We are processing a collective national trauma that leaves no one unscathed, even if they're happy with the outcome. Some of us carry additional burdens – the weight of generational trauma, the fresh wounds of renewed hatred, the bone-deep exhaustion of perpetual vigilance.People will be affected to varying degrees, but no one is exempt.

I’ve spent weeks grieving the illusion of a democracy, that I now realize never truly existed. But even the death of an illusion, a hope, a dream, is still a death.

The specter of disruption, division, and discord loom large, casting long shadows across our collective consciousness. For those who see the handwriting on the wall, who understand that what's coming may eclipse what came before – this liminal space of waiting becomes a frightening thing... a triggering thing...a traumatic thing, a grief-worthy thing.

Every storm, no matter how fierce, eventually exhausts its fury. And even the darkest clouds of oppressive regimes must someday yield to light. Until then, remember: IT'S OKAY FOR YOU TO GRIEVE!

Poetic Pause

As we honor our grief, it’s helpful to remember that hope and sorrow often share the same breath. Not the shallow hope of easy answers, but the deep, defiant hope that runs in our ancestral bloodlines. The kind of hope that knows darkness intimately, and chooses to light candles anyway. In that spirit, I share these words penned last November:

The Weight of Hope

What is the weight of hope
In a time of gathering shadows?
How do we measure its substance
When truth falls like scattered coins
From the pockets of power, when justice seems written in vanishing ink?

I am learning to read hope
like a new language—
not in the bright syllables of denial,
but in the complex grammar of grief,
in the syntax of survival,
in the dialects of determination. See

Hope is not the absence of darkness,
But the memory of light,
Not the negation of pain,
But its transformation.

It lives in the marrow of movements.
In the muscle memory of progress.
In the DNA of dreams that outlived their dreamers.

We've seen this storm before—
different clouds, same thunder.
History speaks in cycles,
Spirals that seem to return
but never land in quite the same place.

Each revolution carries forward
the momentum of those who refused
to let darkness have the final word.

As we close this week's exploration of grief, may we all find the courage to honor our pain, whatever form it takes. May we remember that our tears – whether shed for personal losses or collective traumas – water the seeds of our resilience. In honoring our grief, we claim our humanity.

With understanding and solidarity,

Olivia