It's really never all at once, at least not for me. I always knew it would eventually not feel so heavy and so all consuming, but the getting there was always a bit unclear for me, except for the fact that I knew it would happen slowly and within the little moments of life.
The first sign of it though I didn't know it was there when it happened, but as I look back it is all the more evident. It was a simple early Fall day, a friend and me decided to take a stroll down in Concord, Massachusetts. It was a quintessential fall day where the sun would hit your face through the maple colored leaves changing and a slight jacket was all you needed for the cool breeze gently passing us by. Just enough for the first of many warm drink days ahead.
We landed a local little coffee shop and I remember asking the barista. better yet telling them, I have recently figured out lactose doesn't sit well with me anymore, can you suggest something that will still allow me to have a vanilla latte without making me want to die over the next hour. And sure enough the barista introduced me to oat milk.
I was hesitant, as I was of honestly anything that entered my mouth since last November. The nausea that had met me over the past few months was not yet a thing of the past. But slowly I had learned my body, adjusted, vocalized what I needed, and found my way to a new kind of go-to order. Something I had loved for so many years, reshaped for the new me. Not completely scratched. Just a shift.
It's funny how grief does that. It doesn't make you scrap the whole thing altogether, but it does force a shift. It creates a before and an after to an unexpected chapter in your adult life. I loved to eat, and don't even get me started on my coffee habit. A couple of espresso shots in the morning, before bed, anytime in between. Coffee was mine add some vanilla and milk to it and it was a party. And I hated that somewhere along the way, something I loved had started hurting me without me even realizing it had changed.
That day in Concord, I took a sip and waited.
And it was delicious. And it stayed.
That was the first time in months my body had said yes to something. I hadn't been looking for a sign. I was just on a walk with a friend on a fall day. And something quietly came back online.
Healing sometimes arrives like that, not announced, not dramatic. Just a warm latte on a Tuesday that tastes exactly right. And you realize, somewhere between the first sip and the walk home, that you are already further along than you knew.