#84 Coffee with John

Coffee with John #84, serendipity at its best.

I so appreciated this meetup.  I had the opportunity to cry, get to know an awesome person, and, eventually, express myself here with these words. 

Approximately six-months had passed since I had last stepped inside the YMCA before CWJ #84. I had kept postponing going for months after my yearly membership had lapsed.

Not sure what prompted me to go but it was a spontaneous decision on a lazy, Sunday afternoon.  As I was renewing my membership, a woman behind me was scanning her card to get her workout. Took me a few minutes to recognize her behind the mask.

She is someone that worked at the Y before being furlough because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She worked closely with Lari (my wife) when Lari worked at the Y membership services. This person had been someone that I knew peripherally, always friendly and warm to each other but never quite close, in comparison to other people from the Y circle.

She, along with a whole army of other folks at the Y, did a lot for Lari, playing a key role in doing just a lot for my family during and after my wife’s battle with cancer.

I can’t remember the last time I had seen her. “I saw you in the Ballantyne Magazine. I never read it but I took the magazine on a recent trip and there I saw you and read about your project,” was one of the first things she mentioned as we met on that fortuitous Sunday afternoon.

A week or a few weeks later, on a windy, cold morning, we were sitting across each other sharing a cup of coffee. The conversation flowed with me getting to know about her, husband, son, and her experiences.

Unexpectedly, as we were wrapping up, we both ended up crying. At that moment, she shared with me her perspective and experience during Lari’s Life Celebration Event, held at the Y with about 150+ people in attendance. In addition to sharing memories and stories, the event culminated with a Zumba dance to honor my wife’s passion for dancing and her Zumba instructing days. My coffee mate shared with me how difficult it was for her to join in the dance. For her, the dancing seemed out of place. She was overcome with sadness and felt overwhelmed by the experience, opting to sit down and grief in her own way, which she was completely entitled to do without any reservations.

My takeaway, we all grieve and process loss differently. Culture, religion, personal beliefs all influence the process. There is no right or wrong way. Cry, dance, wallow, seek therapy, do what it takes to mourn, grief.

I have to be mindful of that because I tend to harden -up, not allowing for room to wallow in sorrow when confronted with loss. With Lari’s passing, I have become more sensitive, honoring both my emotions and that of others. Still, my threshold for identifying and carrying that loss into different aspects of my life in a negative way is low.

The cornerstone and drive behind this project is the antithesis of letting sorrow drown you down. I don’t want to reminisce or talk about the past or how unfair life is/was. I want to celebrate, dance, and soak life’s experiences while honoring the light that Lari brought into this world. I carry her in my heart and will always love her.

But I am going on a tangent, not the direction I had intended for this takeaway. The beauty is that that’s part of the process we call healing.

My other takeaway: trust the universe to bring you together with the people that you are mean to meet, not when you want/desire but when the universe feels appropriate.