Posts Tagged ‘letting go and holding on|quest-magazine-2014-05’

My uncle had lost his powers of speech by the time he died. In his hospital bed, surrounded by his loved ones, he used a bead board to spell out what he wanted to say during his final days.

It was the weekend before I was scheduled for a biopsy. Marta spent the morning gathering stones on the beach. Later that evening, she pressed a smooth round stone into my hand and said I know that when you’re facing a challenge it helps to have something to hold onto.

A one-paragraph newspaper article describes a subway platform during the morning rush hour at Grand Central Terminal. A train pulls in; a well-dressed woman gets off. Before the doors close, the woman realizes that she is holding only one of her leather gloves.

Oh, letting go. Every so often a minister has to preach on something that is absolutely not a personal strength. And this is one of those times. I’m not a letter-go; I’m an attacher and a holder-on. I hold onto people and relationships I love.

We don’t get a say in the roots we inherit, even as they stretch beneath the surface of our daily lives and contain within them countless stories of danger and survival and elation and heartbreak that inform our living in ways we understand and ways we do not.