I just read that two years is twenty-four months or
seven hundred and thirty days or
seventeen thousand five-hundred and twenty hours or
one million, fifty-one thousand, two hundred minutes or
sixty-three million, seventy-two thousand seconds.

When there’s a global crises and everyone is acting different, locked up, face masked, afraid, hoarding toilet paper, working from home, staying six feet apart, lonely, watching way too much TV, ordering take-out again and again, lining up in cars for a vaccination, or counting off the days to normal – two years can seem to pass slowly.

Two years ought to be enough time to get on with life, to find the next path to take, but who can get through all the weeds that are now sprouting in the vacant lot that’s life as we know it? Working from home for good, retiring early, supply chain problems, school board wrestling matches, children at home or school, airplane fist fights and new variations of virus floating up from who knows where. Two years may not be long enough, right?

I’m ready for the flight director to announce over the intercom when we will be landing and I can unbuckle this seat belt that’s been constricting my life for what feels like, I don’t know, two years. When will there be time to get off and get on with what ought to be happening? Unpacking, looking at the view from the new balcony, seeing what’s for dinner, imagining the next sunrise. Isn’t it time to turn to the next page?

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.” ― C.S. Lewis

Two years of everything on hold while working together to keep afloat. The past few days seem like the space of two years. I can’t seem to get started on putting out all the fires that burn in any normal week. There just wasn’t time to move on. Grief needs to have its time and space to breathe and find a place. These past two years just didn’t have any time for me to pause for long – and yet I did way too much sitting like bump. Maybe just a little shock settling in every now and then.

“God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.”  ― Walter de la Mare

I recently trudged through a few airports lugging a too heavy suitcase. It wasn’t modern enough. Didn’t roll very well. We’ve all been there, right? Trying to get across three football fields full of people in five minutes lugging two sacks of cement on roller skates. Traveling for the novice is such an adventure. Two years hauling around a grief I’ve not had time or space to check.

“The tears I feel today
I’ll wait to shed tomorrow.
Though I’ll not sleep this night
Nor find surcease from sorrow.
My eyes must keep their sight:
I dare not be tear-blinded.
I must be free to talk
Not choked with grief, clear-minded.
My mouth cannot betray
The anguish that I know.
Yes, I’ll keep my tears til later:
But my grief will never go.”
― Anne McCaffrey