The Tightrope—A Delicate Dance of Loss, Life and Hope
Every so often, someone else’s words echo the ache and the hope I’ve been living.
“We can’t sidestep pain, but we also can’t bypass beauty. So I live with one foot firmly planted in grief and the other in joy. Always a tightrope, straddling an invisible line, striking a delicate balance. Dancing with death while life blooms all around me. Planting flowers and watering them with my tears. Saying hello at the same time as I am waving goodbye. Holding tightly and releasing, again and again for eternity. Grief and joy. Grief and joy.”—Julia, @girl_meets_grief
I read these words this morning.
They struck me.
This is a truth about grief. Julia shares from the perspective of mother loss and childhood grief. For me, it takes shape in my own story—this 3rd August without my spouse, the 5th without my mom, and the 8th without my dad.
I have walked a few tightropes in my day.
I have long been straddling joy and grief, grief and joy. Holding on and letting go. Weeding and watering with tears of sorrow and tears of hope.
I remember writing a reflection that first end of summer without my dad in 2018, only a few short weeks after he left this world following an ugly long medical fight for life. There may have been a fight for dignity and life as we knew it, too. I titled that reflection The Space Between Grief and Joy. I have yet to publish the words. They still sit in my “working projects” binder.
Maybe they stay there because I have been walking a tightrope ever since. Dancing between tears and hope. Maybe I will have to dust them off soon. Maybe they stay there because they were only for me and God.
In May 2018, my oldest daughter went through her second cochlear implant surgery. We celebrated the gift of sound—yet grieved the reality that her life would always depend on technology. Nights of silence when she slept. Equipment charging on the counter. Worry about the effects of Bluetooth in her skull. Months of training and adaptation. Joy and grief, side by side.
Just two days after her surgery, my dad suffered a heart attack. In mid July, he was gone, while we were supporting my daughter’s healing, celebrating her new sound and the amazing support we received. I am always reminded on the same day my youngest had a cast removed. We were also saying goodbye to the patriarch of our family, to my dad, to the G-Pa my kids adored.
Joy and immense grief colliding in the same season.
Then came August and time for school. A sudden change in leadership at the school we had prayerfully chosen for our children shifted the very culture of the place and our hopes and goals for the girls middle and high school education. What once felt steady and promising was turned upside down.
Looking back, it almost mirrored our family life—when the leader is gone, everything shifts. Loss and death does this to families. That was the story when my dad died, and is the story since my husband died. I’ve heard this is a familiar story in grief: maybe you’ve seen this truth too.
Sadly, we are a grief-illiterate world. And the truth is Death was never part of God’s plan.
By that fall, silence in my home during school hours finally gave space for the ache to surface. I grieved my dad, my mom’s new aching loneliness as a new widow, my daughter’s long fight with hearing loss, and the unraveling of what I thought would be stable for our kids. By January, I withdrew my two youngest from the school and started homeschooling. We have not looked back. Now, all these years later, my youngest is stepping into her senior year of high school.
Often while in the middle of these challenges—sometimes survival moments—we can’t see all that God is doing in the moment. But we surrender, trust and obey. We take leaps of faith. We can’t always see it immediately, but our faith carries us through and in time we may be given eyes to see how God used these moments. I can look back now and see how God was preparing me for a time such as this. But it still is a tight rope, a balance of joy met with immense and quiet grief.
We prayerfully discerned by January the next best step to homeschool our girls given the challenges and changes at the school AND to honor the space the girls each needed to grieve the loss of their grandfather, the changes in family dynamics and the effect hearing loss had on THEIR lives and wanting to spend more time with my mom. Little did we know how homeschooling would be the best gift of time when their dad was diagnosed a year later.
That was quite a tightrope I was walking. Often a blind and a very unique balancing act.
The next tightrope came quickly.
In the years that followed, our lives were marked by fighting cancer, supporting Jon through surgeries and a stroke, clinging to time, and learning to say goodbye. I had to put aside a long desired goal to work toward a Master’s degree which I started only months before Jon was diagnosed. We were also launching kids, holding onto milestones, and trying—sometimes feebly, sometimes fiercely—to water seeds of hope and joy in the midst of suffering. It was a relentless both/and: welcoming life and lamenting loss.
Holding tightly and releasing again and again. Slowing down, stopping altogether, catching our balance as we were falling. Sometimes we surrendered to the fall and were caught in the net by the hand of the comforter with peace and love. Words St. Augustine once wrote feel fitting: “In my deepest wound I saw your glory, and it dazzled me.”
“In my deepest wound I saw your glory, and it dazzled me.”
St. Augustine
And here we are—this year feels like another kind of tightrope. But different in many ways. I am balancing many different things, so many things and so many emotions. Struggling to stay on the thin line of solo parenting and figuring out many major life decisions on my own. Let’s be clear, I am capable, I just chose to walk through life with a best friend and partner in life who balanced well with me and I with him. It’s a shock to our lives when that person is no longer there.
It is the third school year since Jon died. How in the world? My kids are moving and growing, as they should while navigating their own grief journey. I am finding my footing in new ways. We are grasping at joy wherever we can while grief still catches me—like when I load the truck for another move and the tears come without warning. Like the glass that shattered last week and then a treasured milk glass candy dish where the stem broke. It took me a while to pick up those pieces, too. Gosh, I am ever so grateful for the moments where sheer laughter and happiness echos in the walls of our home or on long journeys on car trips.
This is another delicate balance…and an ache beyond explanation when one feels this way…not because I want to stay in sorrow, no griever wants that, but because the reality that your person is not part of those new memories unless what brings the happiness is laughing and speaking about memories of that person. In a sense, you feel further away from them as you can keep moving forward. Yet because we believe in the resurrection life, we know it is one day closer.
We feel the absence of the leader of our family—our beloved husband/father, of my parents, of the grandparents and family my kids deserved who would have cheered them on and supported them in these most difficult days since their dad died too young. We feel the sting of relationships, even some we once counted as close, that have quietly or unexpectedly slipped away in the wake of our loss. It is confusing and painful beyond words. We have chosen forgiveness, though the ache of absence still lingers at times.
The tightrope of balancing forgiveness and patience, pain and acceptance, gratitude and hope for those who are and stayed near and gave us so much grace.
We have also seen the presence of amazingly loving people—our Simons of Cyrene, Our Good Samaritans—that God has placed on our path. Those who truly walk with us and sit with our tears without judgment, who bring compassion and laughter, safety and guidance, presence and unconditional love, and who offer us a soft place to land and sometimes invite us in and or bring us a meal.
Loss reshapes life. It brings absence, but it also brings unexpected change, pruning, and planting. We have seen hope. We have felt joy. We have laughed and loved. This summer we have seeded, watered well with tears, and tended good soil. Already, fruit is beginning to show in ways we are only beginning to see. I think of a favorite verse I have returned to often on this journey is Psalm 126:5: “Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy.”
This is the tightrope.
The dance.
The delicate balance.
Between grief and joy.
Watered with tears of hope and grief.
And life still blooms.
Maybe you, too, have walked this tightrope.
If you do, may you know you are not alone—grief and joy can walk together. In the silence of long nights, in the ache of loss that collides with everyday life, in the ordinary rhythms of packing trucks, charging equipment, or watching children grow and fly—you are not the only one straddling both. The tears you water with, the seeds you tend, the fruit you long to see…they are all part of the same dance.
So the tightrope remains.
Some days it feels impossibly thin, other days steady enough to take the next step. Always it asks me as I walk and balance to live in the “both/and” of grief and joy.
I may wobble, I may weep, but I keep moving—balancing the tears of joy with the tears of grief. If I have learned anything as I have walked this tightrope, it is that flowers and life still bloom, watered with both tears and grace.
“For everything there is a season… a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” —Ecclesiastes 3:1,4
Heather Lebano
If I have learned anything as I have walked this tightrope, it is that flowers and life still bloom, watered with both tears and grace.
Never mind the song Tightrope and the movie The Greatest Showman holds significant meaning to our family and to our many seasons of tightrope walking and dancing. So I included this song as an ode to a special moment and memory.
