Every Day There Are Little Mournings

Every day there are little mournings.

Every day I am one day older, closer to the death of my body at least. I’m closer to departing my wife, and when my kids leave the house. I mourn this.

I mourn too, the end of summer. I grieve over the wonderful salad I ordered at lunch yesterday, and that I can never experience it for the first time again. I mourn the joy that will never be just as it was again, when we all read Caps for Sale at Griffin’s bedtime and he giggled with his whole belly over the “tsk-tsk-tsk” impressions the entire family was doing in his bedroom.

Little mournings are not that of a big, lightless death, but of the little things that come and go but are now gone.

I mourn today the three baby squirrels that fell from their little hiding spot at our garage. We buried them in the backyard with a small stone to mark their grave. I wept because even though they were in no way mine, they were still children. That I mourned these three felt peculiar, but was somehow a relief. It was almost as if I wanted to mourn something, for its own sake.

The act of mourning is one of the realest, unmediated moments of a person’s life. It is simply the mind and body fully immersed in sadness and expressing love at the same time. It is a moment when emotion pours out of me, heaping into my folded hands.

I need the little mourning. It pulls other darknesses with it, out of my heart. It is grounding because the feeling is not performative or AI-generated, distracted, or hurried. The moments of little mourning are followed by brief, perfect, serenities.

Today my little mourning was these squirrels, I prayed and wept for them sincerely. Those tears also washed away at least a little of my hardest work stress. I forgot for a moment, about the world’s injustices against the vulnerable, or the guilt I feel about the chores I haven’t done for my family. The mourning started with sadness but ended with an expression of love. When I put the shovel back in our garage, there was peace in my heart.

I resisted these moments of mourning for so many years, preferring a stiff upper lip. Little mournings, I welcome you now.

I welcome the little moments of grieving and suffering, that make my heart more open to be filled with light and peace. These little moments of mourning, bring little moments of suffering, sure. But from these little moments of suffering come slightly bigger moments of peace and relief.