Strands of Silver

A strand of silver hair on the shoulder, quickly brushed off, is of no consequence to the causal observer, but what if that single stray strand has a story to tell?

The first order of business: Welcome to my new subscribers!

Welcome Elena H., Nancy P., Nancy F., G_S C., Meredith J., Sue J., Alice, Jonty H. and Kris H.! I am so excited to have you here. Thank you so much for subscribing to this new writing venture that I am just beginning.

A Bit of Context - Building Background for the Creation of Strands of Silver

Strands of Silver was birthed out of loss. In 2010, my life turned upside down when my thirty-four-year-old daughter took her life. In a split second everything in my life changed upon learning of her death. That moment of upheaval sent shock waves of disruption upending any sort of path forward into a future I could envision that made sense. I simply could not integrate my present state of shock and disbelief with a past that had been untouched by significant loss. For days, months, even years, the dissonance in my mind undermined hope for a future I’d always believed would be mine. My life no longer made sense. I simply did not know who I was or who I ever had been before my daughter took her life.

Julie with Phoenix - April 3, 2010 (The Last Photo I Took of Her Just Six Weeks Before Her Death

Jerry Stittser, in his book, A Grace Disguised, wrote¹

Catastrophic loss is like undergoing a loss of our identity.

My old identity as a mother of five adult children, a grandmother, a wife did not just shift, it was shattered. The interior of my heart was so changed that to name its condition as broken-hearted does not begin to describe what had happened to me. I feared a breaking of my mind that would match what had happened to my heart.

In those first dark days of grief, outwardly, I was trying to understand and work through life altering loss by writing. Daily journal writing became the way I processed my own private inward expression of shock, denial, and grief. I was trying to find myself again, trying to give voice to the new, greatly altered state of being of who I was or had been. Inwardly, I was rejecting, could not accept, how I was inhabiting a new reality about my life.

I also began to write on-line about my daughter, her life, her death, and about my own grief. Writing on-line gave me a place where I could share an outward public expression of grief. A blog I began at this time, where I did most of my one-line writing, played a major role in my healing.

As Diane Langberg said,

The paradox of healing from something that caused great pain is that is involves speaking about the unspeakable.

Writing helped me come to terms with a new identity: a suicide loss survivor.

During those first dark days of grief, inwardly another change was taking place within my body. A new auto-immune disease was wreaking havoc on my body in ways I was totally oblivious to in its initial stages. Inflammation began to attack my hair follicles. Not only did the inflammation attack the follicles, but it was also killing them, destroying the bulb on each single strand of hair and leaving a scar in its place. I had developed frontal fibrosing alopecia ² during that time of deep grieving, and I had no idea that I was even losing my hair because my heart was too consumed by grief.

A single strand of silver on the shoulder was not noticed. A hundred strands on the black fleece hoodie I wore everyday was brushed off without a second thought. One summer day, during that summer of sorrow, a neighbor, a dear, beautiful, and loving person, an older woman with the most beautiful heads of silver hair I’d ever seen, said to me one day, “Sally, you seem to be shedding a lot of hair. Have you had that checked out?”

“Oh,” I said, “I guess the tinsel is falling off this old tree.”

Finally, I began to note that tinsel was indeed falling, a lot of it. I couldn’t style my hair as I once had. It had become thin and unmanageable, but I still had hair, so I was not deeply in touch with the hair loss I was experiencing.

My silver strands were thin a year after my daughter’s death, but they still formed a soft halo around my head.

I could not have comprehended that in just a few years I would be seventy percent bald. I could never have imagined I would in time take on one more identity of loss: a hair loss survivor.

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Heartbreak is experienced internally. I felt as if I were experiencing the origin of the word.  In fact, I said to my husband, "My heart hurts.”

Healing came from the external motions of living: waking up, getting out of bed, fixing a meal, eating a meal, gardening, walking, connecting with friends.

Heartache decreased as I integrated the business of living and grieving.

Strands of Silver is about integrating all aspects of life into a meaningful whole.

During last decade plus three years there were many times when my life seemed to be in shreds, splintered beyond repair. Often, all I could see were strands of the life I had before strewn across the current landscape of my life. I wished I could just toss aside all the losses that were piling up around me into what seemed like an ash heap of life’s horrible experiences. I wished all those losses could be forgotten, left behind, cast aside, but I could not do so. I wanted to heal. Denial had protected me until my mind could grasp all that had happened to me so suddenly, so unexpectedly, but I determined denial was not going to hold me captive.

I needed a way to weave all the strands of my life together.

Context is everything.

Context /ˈkäntekst/ the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.

I learned I could not understand anything about my life, if I did not see the whole of it in context.

I could not look at one individual strand of my life, and understand all there was to understand about my life in particular, or about life in general.

Perspective - I needed perspective to understand how the identity shifting events in my life could be woven into the entire tapestry of my life.

No tapestry is woven by one single strand, nor was my life defined by individual strands of experience within it.

Context

Con - together, with,

-text - to weave

Strands of Silver: a weaving of all the strands of my life.

It’s not over yet. I have not arrived at a point where the dissonance over disparate parts of my life are congruent. Picking up the strands of my story by writing about all the strands of life that have made up my story is an on-going process. I can’t make sense of story, nor can anyone makes sense of one’s own story, until all that went into the making of the story is examined.

“What's writ is what's read, yet the meaning is gone, since context is what gives each quote its own home.”
― Will Advise

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My story is the whole of my life. Meaning cannot be found by taking one part of my story out of the narrative. My story is a weaving of all the parts of it. My story is made up of many strands.

As I weave it all together, I’m finding silver threads run through it in beautiful ways.

1. “ A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss” by Jerry Sittser

2

https://scarringalopecia.org/about-scarring-alopecia/types/frontal-fibrosing-alopecia/