Bird wings

Birdwings: Learning to Live with Grief I recently came across the poem *Birdwings* by Rumi. It speaks about grief in a way that feels deeply true to the experience of loss. The poem says that grief “lifts a mirror” to where we are bravely working. When I read that line, I thought about my daughter, Sana. Grief often feels like something that breaks us, but Rumi suggests something different. Grief reflects love. The depth of our sorrow reveals the depth of the relationship we had. When someone we love deeply is gone, the absence becomes a mirror showing how much they mattered. Since Sana’s passing, I have noticed that grief does not move in a straight line. Some days the weight of it is overwhelming. Other days there are small moments of quiet—memories that bring warmth rather than only pain. For a long time I wondered if this movement between sorrow and calm meant I was somehow doing grief incorrectly. Rumi’s metaphor of the hand opening and closing helped me understand this rhythm. A hand cannot remain a fist forever, nor can it remain open all the time. It must move between the two in order to function. Grief is similar. If we stayed in the deepest pain constantly, we would not be able to continue living. But if we never allowed ourselves to feel the sorrow, we would lose touch with the love that created the grief in the first place. The poem ends with a powerful image: contracting and expanding emotions moving together like birdwings. Both movements are necessary for flight. I think about this often now. One wing carries grief for Sana—the longing, the memories, the questions that will never have answers. The other wing carries the love she left behind and the strength I am still trying to build from it. Perhaps healing is not about letting go of grief. Perhaps it is about learning how to fly with both wings.