The sadness waited.
That is what I understand now about the years when I was not sad, or was not noticeably sad, or was sad in the background in the way you are sad in the background when the foreground is full and the foreground has to come first because the foreground is the children and the work and the parents and the logistics of a life that does not stop requiring things because you are having feelings. The sadness waited. It sat in the anteroom of my life for years, patient, not going anywhere, understanding that eventually there would be a lull and the lull was when it would be received.
The lull came when I retired.
Not immediately. But within the first months of the quiet, in the space that the constant forward-motion had occupied, I found things I had left there. Griefs I had moved past rather than through. Losses that had been acknowledged in transit and then set aside because the next thing was already arriving and demanded attention. The particular grief of the years I did not fully inhabit because I was managing them rather than living them. All of it still there, waiting, not rotted or diminished but simply stored, held in the body the way the body holds things, without language, without the full permission of the mind, waiting for a time when there was a time.
I was not prepared for the sadness when it came.
Even though I knew it would come, even though I had read the accounts of people who said this happens, that the body catches up in the quiet, that the emotions that were deferred come due when the deferral is over. Even knowing, I was not prepared for the specific quality of it, for the sadness about things I thought I had moved past, for the grief of years I had been in but not present to, for the mourning of my own life, which sounds strange and is not strange, which is the appropriate response to noticing that some of the years went by faster than they should have because you were moving through them rather than in them.
I let it come.
That is the whole of what I had to do. Make room for what was waiting. Let the anteroom empty. Sit with it without trying to resolve it ahead of schedule, without managing the sadness the way I had managed everything else. Just let it be sad for as long as it needed to be sad, which was not as long as I feared, which was a season and then a lightening, and then the particular quality of a morning that follows a long cry and is clean in a way that mornings that precede it are not.
The sadness had things to teach me. I am glad I let it speak.
