You learn to tough it out.
You learn to accept.
You learn to surrender.
You learn to lean into the arms of grace
both unseen, from the realms above,
and extended through a human hand.
You get through tattered and torn around the edges.
You get through wondering how you've managed
to make it through this far
You get through hanging on for dear life.
You get through shaken and shuddering
and sheared of everything
but your quivering mind and quaking heart,
and the distant echo of a memory that this was why you came here.
though you think there has been some colossal mistake,
inscrutably, incredibly, something in you knows
that this is precisely what you came here
so valiantly to endure:
this merciless nakedness
of heart and soul.
El Collie Kress
11/4/1947 - 4/17/2002
My mother, El, was 54 years old when she died by suicide.
