365 Moments of Healing

I stare at the skin on my thumb, the skin that a week ago wasn’t there. My hands got sweaty inside the rubber gloves I was using to mop, the mopping I didn’t want to do but did anyway because the cleaning help didn’t come. When I peeled off the gloves, the skin was gone. Rubbed off, I assume.

It instantly hurt, just from knowing it was there. It of course did not hurt a minute prior to this knowledge.

I tried ointment. I tried a bandaid. But the fresh raw baby pink skin underneath just stayed exposed. It was painful. I tried my hardest not to bump it into anything, but it was unavoidable. The thumb, a majorly used digit. A very important component of the hand.

I’m somewhat obsessive about washing my hands, and every time I washed them the skin stared at me, wet and pink. Vulnerable and unprotected.

And then a fascinating thing started to happen. The skin began to grow back. This is fascinating because the human body is equipped with much of what it needs to heal itself. It can grow skin! That’s amazing!

I watched every day as the fresh pink flesh began to get tighter and tighter, until eventually the skin began to grow from the edges in towards the center of the wound. The color turned more white and less pink. The healing process was well under way.

As the layers of skin continued to grow back, I reflected on this past year of healing, and all the small moments that came together to mend our souls.

The first few months after my mother died were the hardest. From going to her grave which I knew I wasn’t supposed to do for the first year, to sitting in the driveway by our old house crying hysterically in my car, I tried to find her everywhere. Every time I thought about never seeing her again, I felt like an astronaut who walked off the surface of the moon and was doomed to float in outer space forever, until death. This was a very morbid and depressing thought. It was very scary in its intensity. My thinking is already catastrophic by nature, and being an “all or nothing” kind of person doesn’t create the most positive mindset for my life.

But this, having a death in my family, was something I didn’t think I would ever fully recover from.

Let me tell you, grieving is a beautiful process. Beautiful in the sense that there is a way for our souls to heal and for our lives to find a way to continue on. We continue if not for ourselves, then for the fact that we have no other option.

“I felt happy, and then I felt sad.” This from a person who’s experienced this loss. It is a part of life to feel guilt in moving on without a loved one who passed. But to live is what we were put here for.

After the grieving came and went, there wasn’t an actual time when my body said, now it’s time to live again. There was no moment of healing. It came in spurts. It came in minutes and hours and days.

Sometimes healing can take a lifetime. And sometimes it can take just a week for skin to grow back, for a life to feel rejuvenated.

G-d created sickness and death, and He also, in His infinite kindness, created healing. It is like a hug or a warm smile from my mother. It is feeling like I’m being cared for. It is sensing her presence and feeling like she is here with me.

It is knowing that eternity is not forever, and it is the comfort of knowing that there must be something after death. Of wondering and imagining what her soul is doing now, if perhaps it was gifted to another little boy or girl who needed to be born.

My mother always used to talk about what it would be like to be a grandmother. She would joke that my siblings would bring their kids over and when it was time to leave my mother would hide them under the covers and say, I don’t know where they went!

Well, now I imagine that she’s up in heaven playing with my own unborn children, getting to know them and love them and protect them until it is time for them to be born. She’ll be for me and for my family the same person she was in life, only now she has much greater capabilities then she ever did in life. I’d like to imagine that she’s free of all her fears and worries that weighed her down. I’d like to think that she’s full of happiness and laughter, the sides of her I saw come and go in life.

My wound will be closed up soon, fully healed in a way that would appear as if the skin was never blemished to begin with. Such is the amazing feat of the body.

And the soul, this in time will be fully healed too. Such is the nature of grief. It is ours for a time, and then it must move on, to make room for growth and wonder and life. The dead must move on, to make room for the living.

Blessed are You Oh Lord, Who created healing. Blessed are You Who gave us the strength to go on.