By Meghan Fitzpatrick, Hospice & Palliative Care Representative
Old Colony Hospice & Palliative Care
I have always lived by the coast. I have traveled across the country, and it is a beautiful one from coast to coast, but I have always been drawn to water. There is something about being near it that feels familiar to me.
So when my best friend invited me to celebrate her birthday in New Mexico, I was happy to go, but I couldn’t quite understand the appeal of traveling to the desert.
I had driven through the desert a few times. It was beautiful to look at, but I remember thinking there wasn’t really anything there. Just rocks and sky.
Flying into Albuquerque, I looked out the window and saw nothing but brown. It looked desolate.
Then I spent some time there.
We stayed in a hotel in the high desert north of Santa Fe, and on our first morning, we went for a hike. I was blown away.
I knew the desert was beautiful, but I had never really noticed how full of life it was.
There were so many different kinds of hardy little plants, each one adapted to survive in a landscape that seemed, from above, almost incapable of sustaining anything. Those plants supported an entire ecosystem of birds, lizards, cows, horses and countless creatures I probably never even saw.
The landscape I had seen from the airplane window had seemed barren. Up close, it was anything but.
It was alive.
Abundant, complicated, resilient life was growing in a place I had mistaken for empty.
As someone who works in hospice, I couldn’t help but see the lesson in that.
Loss is devastating. I don’t think there is a word that adequately captures what losing someone we love does to us. It is monumental. It changes the shape of our lives. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or hasn’t experienced it yet.
Grief can make our lives look barren, too.
When I was in my 20s, I had a friend who, after a years-long fight with breast cancer, decided she was done. She wanted to enjoy the life she had left without nausea, hospital visits and the constant demands of treatment.
I understood her decision, but understanding it didn’t make losing her any easier.
It felt like a part of my life that had always been an oasis was drying up, leaving nothing but dust in its wake.
Before she died, my friend and I had completed a yoga teacher training together. In her memory, her husband started a nonprofit that offered free specialized yoga classes to women in various stages of breast cancer.
Of course, I volunteered.
And from that loss came my students.
They were some of the strongest women I have ever known. Each one arrived with a story, and each one left something with me.
One woman, who was in the final stages of her disease, taught me that pain and anger do not necessarily have to come together.
Another, who had gone into remission while holding down a job and raising two young children, taught me the true meaning of “buck up.”
They all taught me something I still carry with me today: I am lucky every day I swing my legs out of bed.
At the time, I could only see what I was losing. I couldn’t yet see what would grow from it.
That is one of the strange things about grief. We tend to think that when someone dies, everything connected to them dies, too. Sometimes it does. There are pieces of our lives that disappear with the people we love, and we are right to mourn them.
But sometimes something else happens.
Sometimes life finds a way to grow in the space they leave behind.
It may not look like the life we had before. It may not be easy to recognize at first. It can be harder to find. It can have sharp edges.
It can be pricklier.
But it is there.
There is life in the desert.
There can be life in grief, too.
Sometimes we just have to get close enough to see it.
About the Author: Meghan Fitzpatrick is a business development representative at Old Colony Hospice & Palliative Care. She has a strong background in assisted living and dementia care. She is also a trained support group facilitator for the Alzheimer’s Association. Her compassion and knowledge make her a vital part of Old Colony Hospice’s outreach efforts. She is a trusted resource in the community, connecting with families, providers, and community partners throughout the region and can be reached at mfitzpatrick@oldcolonyhospice.com.
