The place I pitched my tent the night I camped at Cape Alava recently on Washington’s coastal shore of the Olympic National Park, was a bit beyond the reach of high tide and in the shadow of Tskawayah Island.
Or might have been in the shadow of the forbidden, fog-enshrouded, formidable spruce-encrusted island, a sacred and treasured place having withstood eons of wind-whipped waves of storms, except there was no setting sun, and therefore no lengthening shadows.
There were no shadows at all.
As night descended, and I slowly drifted off to sleep to the sound of incoming waves rolling up and over the boulder-strewn shore, an unseen wraith-like ghostly visitant, an apparition, entered through the trees, it’s presence not made known that it had been there until the next morning.
It was mist, a fog, that encased, surrounded, engulfed, and blanketed everything.
Like what grief does.
Experiencing the suffocating fog of sorrow, the Psalmist David nevertheless would write what has consoled millions when he put pen to paper these words: “weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5).
Interestingly, the word for “endure” means properly “to lodge” as one does for a little time. The idea is, weeping is like a wayfaring person, whose stay is relatively brief, who is after all a stranger, is thus just passing through, who travels place to place, without a fixed home.
Grief, and its cousin sorrow, are not permanent residents.
Maclaren writes of sorrow’s departure and joy’s replacement: “Recuperative powers come into play, and the pang departs and poignancy is softened.
“It will not be a joy like what the world calls joy – loud-voiced, boisterous, ringing with idiot laughter, but it will be pure, and deep, and sacred, and permanent.”
This is joy that is cousin to courage, and cheerfulness, and thankfulness, and gratitude, and buoyancy, and resolution.
This kind of joy is not makeshift, contrived, artificial or unrealistic.
This kind of joy is discovered.
Like what I wrote about previously, missing my wife of 50 years married, lost to cancer, but finding treasures on the beach at Cape Alava – or perhaps the treasures found me – that reminded me, that even there, poignancy is softened. Sorrow travels on. Our love remains. There are reminders.
Postscript: Melody, a reader of what I’d written about the ‘treasures that found me’ that day there on the beach at Cape Alava, shared that on the very day of what would have been her 43rd Anniversary last July – that she too “had lost her heart to cancer” and that she too was wandering along a beach – Melody came upon a treasure of her own.
‘Hidden’ in plain sight, as if awaiting this moment, on this day of all special days, her steps to be at this place at this time almost as if directed by another, she stopped, stunned, and starred, even as the tears formed, for there, affixed to a log along the beach was a message created out of old rusted bottle caps:
“We love you Melody.”
Sorrow departs, sometimes reluctantly, the unwelcome visitor that it is, and the joy of having loved much remains, a permanent resident, a treasure that finds us.
