Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,26

exactly which memory I am recalling with each lingering touch. Knowing that her daughter is preparing to say good-bye to her mother and that her mother is preparing to say good-bye to her daughter.

My grandmother reaches over, rests her hand on mine, and looks at me deeply.

This is when the Ache becomes too powerful to resist. I am out of practice. I don’t stiffen. I don’t hold my breath. I don’t break eye contact. I unclench and let it take me.

First it takes me to the thought that one day, not long from now, these roles will shift. I will be in my mother’s place, watching my daughter say good-bye to my mother. Then, not too long from then, it will be my daughter, watching her daughter say good-bye to me. I think these thoughts. I see these visions. I feel them, too. They are hard and deep.

The Ache continues to take me with it, and now I am somewhere else. I am in the Ache. I am in the One Big Ache of lovepainbeautytendernesslonginggoodbye and I am here with my grandmother and my mother, and suddenly I understand that I am here with everyone else, too. Somehow I am here with everyone who has ever lived and ever loved and ever lost. I have entered the place I thought was death, and it has turned out to be life itself. I entered this Ache alone, but inside it I have found everyone. In surrendering to the Ache of loneliness I have discovered un-loneliness. Right here, inside the Ache, with everyone who has ever welcomed a child or held the hand of a dying grandmother or said good-bye to a great love. I am here, with all of them. Here is the “We” that I recognized in Josie’s sign. Inside the Ache is the “We.” We can do hard things, like be alive and love deep and lose it all, because we do these hard things alongside everyone who has ever walked the Earth with her eyes, arms, and heart wide open.

The Ache is not a flaw. The Ache is our meeting place. It’s the clubhouse of the brave. All the lovers are there. It is where you go alone to meet the world. The Ache is love.

The Ache was never warning me: This ends, so leave. She was saying: This ends, so stay.

I stayed. I held my grandmother Alice Flaherty’s paper hands. I touched the wedding rings she still wore twenty-six years after my grandfather’s death. “I love you, honey,” she said. “I love you too, Grandma,” I said. “Take care of that baby for me,” she said.

That was it. I did not say anything remarkable at all. It turns out that a lot of good-bye is done in the touching of things: rosaries, hands, memories, love. I kissed my grandmother, felt her warm, soft forehead with my lips. Then I stood up and walked out of the room. My mother followed me. She shut the door behind us, and we stood in the hallway and held each other and shook. We had taken a great journey together, to the place where brave people go, and it had changed us.

My mom drove me back to the airport. I boarded another plane to Virginia. My dad picked me up, and we drove to the birthing center. I walked into my sister’s room, and she looked over at me from her bed. Then she looked down at the bundle in her arms and up at me again. She said, “Sister, meet your niece, Alice Flaherty.”

I took baby Alice into my arms, and we sat down in the rocking chair next to my sister’s bed. First I touched Alice Flaherty’s hands. Purple and papery. Next I noticed her gray-blue eyes, which stared right into mine. They looked like the eyes of the master of the universe. They said to me: Hello. Here I am. Life goes on.

Since I got sober, I have never been fine again, not for a single moment. I have been exhausted and terrified and angry. I have been overwhelmed and underwhelmed and debilitatingly depressed and anxious. I have been amazed and awed and delighted and overjoyed to bursting. I have been reminded, constantly, by the Ache: This will pass; stay close.

I have been alive.

I was born a little broken, with an extra dose of sensitivity.

—SOME HORSESHIT I WROTE ABOUT MYSELF IN MY FIRST MEMOIR

When I was in my twenties, I believed that somewhere there existed