The Gift of Memories, Triggers & Tears

Christy Bronson is a native Arizonan, mother of ten, nature lover and bibliophile. She has been blessed by the gentle ministry of Sacred Sorrows whose creative practices and community of women have helped to fill up the empty spaces left by the loss of her oldest son, Johnathan, who passed into eternal life at age 26 in 2022.

My 25-year-old daughter recently moved into a brand new apartment community in Scottsdale. The chic boho styled building is gleaming white and glass, offering fantastic views of the Papago mountains, surrounding desert and revamped hip urban sprawl of south Scottsdale. She pays a little extra for the location but the five minute commute to her job and the local scene for twenty-somethings make it worth it for her.

The first time I visited her apartment I realized it had been the site of a very old plaza that housed small businesses and retail stores. Having lived less than two miles down the road from it when I was first married, I recalled driving past it often. I could picture the dusty pink stuccoed plaza set up in an odd orientation. After I had my first baby, I discovered a nutrition store in that plaza. “Nature’s (something)” it was called, and it housed rows of tiny jars of organic baby food. Once my son Johnathan started eating solid food, much of his baby food came from that store for the first year of his life. Mornings at the park were followed by a stop at the store for a few jars of pureed vegetables and a box of tea to enrich my breast milk supply.  Breast feeding, organic baby food, daily walks in the sunshine, nursery rhymes and Beatrix Potter books, baths and long naps made up those days of that first year. I was proud and happy and oh-so-in-love. It seemed as if my whole life had been a waiting time for my motherhood to begin.

Fast forward to the present, where I find myself in a journaling workshop series that Sacred Sorrows is offering for mothers who have lost a child. We reflect and journal about our grief and about our struggle to get up and live each day in the company of our loss. One of the first assignments was about triggers. What triggers your feelings of grief? In the early days, what doesn’t trigger your feelings of grief would be easier to write in the space of the ten or so lines provided. Thankfully, I have moved out of the phase called “acute grief” and thus was able to answer the question probably a little easier than some of the other mothers who are still in their “year of firsts.”

This morning I decided to drive over to Sprouts grocery store after dropping off one of my kids at school. I like shopping early and on weekdays, to avoid the crush of weekend shoppers. I think more efficiently in quiet spaces and I don’t always go to the store with a list. At the end of my selections, I decided to browse the health and beauty section. I stood in the center of the “women’s health” aisle and took a long deep breath, inhaling the herbal smell of the supplements. Breathing slowly and intentionally has become a regular habit now, since the loss of my husband and oldest child. Breathing in life and wellness, breathing out sadness and anxiety - release and surrender. As I breathed in for a moment, the herbal smell of the vitamins triggered me. It took me right back to that Nature’s something store in Scottsdale and, instead of bottles of Calming Night’s Sleep or Women’s Vitality, I visualized rows of Earth’s Best carrots and peas or Johnathan’s favorite - sweet potato and brown rice.

The tears immediately started rolling out of their usual place in their usual steady slide down my face, leaving little wet spots on my mint green t-shirt. I couldn’t stop them. There are times you can and times you just can’t. I was grateful for the lack of shoppers, but it seemed around every corner from that moment on was a willing and helpful employee. It was only 8 am and already this. Expending my precious energy before I’d even put a load of laundry in.  But the memory was precious too. And I was grateful for it. I had been given the gift of  motherhood and my son and he is still with me. Every age and every stage of his life is still a part of my lived experience, lived out of memories that are both sweet and painful. 

I used to think of triggers as only a negative. Like an arrow coming out of a hunter’s bow toward me, my heart an easy casualty. My momentary emotional stability a bulls-eye target.  I have come to realize this grief is an unwelcome guest come to stay, but instead of letting resentment reside alongside him, I am taking the time to get to know this guest and unearth what gifts he might unwittingly bear for me. A small miracle has taken place: to meet a grief trigger with my shoulders squared, a deep breath and my palms receptive.