View from a Prairie Home

By Hege Herfindahl, Columnist

Some days, my heart still aches for my native land; the fiords, the gentle sloping hills and above all, the mountains. The mountains that rise majestically over the landscape. Dramatic and beautiful. Most have deep fissures probably caused by ions of changing climate from warm to icy cold. Water freezing and thawing, creating deep cracks. But after a while with the wind blowing and the dirt from lower elevations moving, soil falls into the cracks and life takes root. Flowers; fragile and delicate, but strong and beautiful, fill the mountain side with beauty. Without the violence that caused mountains to crack, such beauty would not happen.

I think of this now. As I sit here with a broken heart. Maybe this is what life really is; devastation and beauty. Interdependent. Growing, but not linearly. I think of progressing through life as more of a circle. Just like the seasons here on the prairie. Each dependent on what happened before, but also unpredictable. Just like the winter soil carries the promise of spring, so does what happens influence how we grow and change. What has happened doesn’t disappear; it changes us. Makes us what we are or who we will become.

I sit here and wonder about going on. And who I want to become. I have friends who lost children. Car accidents. Cancer. Suicide. Even murder. All of them changed after the life altering tragedies that happened in their lives. Some became bitter. Some used the tragedy to help others in the same situation. And some just died from grief. But most just kept on living. 

I want to do that. Keep on living. I have much to live for, but right now, some moments are so painful, I can hardly breathe. But other moments can still be filled with joy. Seeing my precious grandson, Anders, a freshman at St. Olaf, play his bassoon in the Norsemen band. Getting a hug from my granddaughter and a smile from another grandchild. Being firmly held when dizziness overtakes me by my dear husband. 

But there is a new normal now. Our family, which we proudly announced counted sixteen, is now down to fourteen. It seems a travesty to take family pictures now. We will never totally recover from losing two young men. Even if they are in heaven, they are not with us and five of our eight grandchildren do not have fathers.

45 years ago, when my baby brother was 16, our father died. When we are together, we talk about him. It feels good to have someone who loved him as much as I did. Talking about him, makes us remember him and we both get tears in our eyes even after all this time. 

There really is no such thing as just moving on after a deeply loved one dies. It is moving with. With our grief. Our losses will never go away, but hopefully, with time, the pain will be less intense. The devastation of losing a son, will always be with me, but it doesn’t mean I will be eternally broken. 

If we love, we open our hearts to deep pain. And if we are lucky enough to grow older, all of us will experience pain. We are made of love and scars, healing and grace. As we age, we learn. That is how we mature. The life that comes after our loss is built on everything we grieved; the hopelessness, the life that was and the life that might have been. 

All we experience in life changes us. The hole that is now in my heart will always be with me. But I will try to limp forward. And maybe the joy in a beautiful sunrise and the wet kiss of a baby on my old and wrinkled cheek will be more intense because of the depth of my grief. 

Light always seems brighter when it comes after profound darkness.