"Baby steps? Baby steps through the office? Baby steps out the door. It works! All I have to do is take one little step at a time, and I can do anything! Baby steps around the office! Baaaby steps around the office."
-Billy Murray, What About Bob?
So my little nephew Caleb recently passed his first birthday, and is just beginning to walk. He figured out standing a while ago, and at Christmas he impressed us all by zooming around the house with his new push-and-walk toy. (It looks like a green dragon and plays music incessantly. He loves it). He's getting stronger every time I see him, more confident of his steps. He's learning to walk those steps without holding someone's hand, without balancing against the sofa, without falling. Before we know it, these early days of tentative, exploratory steps will be long gone. He'll be running, dancing, jumping, and driving his parents crazy because he just won't. sit. still. He and Mommy and Daddy and all his Aunties and Uncles won't even remember the days when you could leave him in one place and come back and find him still there.
It's incredibly cliche, but I was thinking earlier about baby steps. And no, I don't generally take my life advice from What About Bob? I mean, seriously, Dr. Marvin is a total fraud. And did you see how that giant bronze bust looked suspiciously like him?
But I was thinking about how living after a great loss requires you to take baby steps. And I'm not just talking about simply focusing on the next, manageable task, as Dr. Marvin suggests--though I find myself doing that instinctively these days. Rather, the idea I hold on to is that small steps, even if they are shaky or hesitant, eventually add up. Before you realize what you've done, you're somewhere else entirely.
Life with grief is a lot like learning to walk all over again. You have to reteach yourself how to move forward. You have to rewrite your understanding of the world--and your place within it. That can mean so many things, and it's different for every person. For me, it has meant being more honest and intimate with my family members: truly saying what I mean, and saying what's on my heart, no matter how difficult it might be. It has meant learning to ask for other people's advice, and at the same time to trust my own instincts. It has meant forgiving myself for imperfection, for struggling, for weakness. It has meant becoming okay with quiet, with silence, with waiting. It has meant being open to new joys in my life, even if my dad is no longer there to share in them.
It's about small moments, and small triumphs. Things you do by yourself for the first time; things that they used to help you with. Enjoying holidays. Creating new traditions. Finding a new favorite restaurant. Filing your tax returns. Replacing smoke alarm batteries. It's about holding on to memories, but also about making room for new ones. It's about living, one step at a time.
