Last week my poor husband had surgery to fix his broken foot. He came out of the operation with multiple industrial pins hammered through each metatarsal and with some ligament repair around his big toe.

It will take several months for the wounds to heal, and then the pins can come out. The hope is that the connective tissue will regrow, and the torn spaces between the bones will knit back together.

When I look at it, I imagine the complexity of the brilliant design underneath the skin. And watching him hump around with his crutches, I’m reminded how crucial the toes and foot are.

The way the bones and joints move together, held by muscles and ligaments. It is an amazing architecture that bears our heavy weight as we walk and run and move through our days. Which makes the foot so uniquely vulnerable.

Grief is like this, I think.

When we lose someone, the death shakes the scaffolding. We are shattered and shocked, sometimes even unable to function. Emotions rip and lacerate our souls, as they drive down deep into our very marrow.

Day after day, the soft, vulnerable parts of ourselves continue to feel tender and bruised. Like a fractured foot, we doubt, oh we doubt, that we will ever walk again.

Some days we take a step or two, but the pain levels us.

But deep inside, the work of healing is taking place. The rent spaces reach toward one another to join, to weave together, cell by cell. Our blood transports new pathways. Our severed nerves lace together to heal.

It is a dark, unseen, mysterious process.

But it does happen.

The thing about a foot is that you can never forget it, it is there in front of your eyes with every step, every place you go.

So it is with loss, even when your swollen sadness subsides, it can never be forgotten, it’s always felt in a peripheral, but constant way.

Our tendons can be stitched up, but they will always be vulnerable. And so it is that we carry the memories of love, and of loss.

But then there is a new thing.

A thing both fragile but reinforced.

The other day I was running and stopped to cry because I was thinking about and missing my mom. Around the holidays, I always miss her so profoundly. It is an ache, like a phantom pain, because I can’t always pinpoint the locus.

But, as with an injured foot, I know how to push down the pain. And I can ignore the genesis of the grief itself, and just keep moving on.

Or I can just let the tears come, let the fractured bone of loneliness push into my muscle memory, allow it to gouge and ultimately cripple me.

And it does.

But this new thing, I see through a kind of x-ray of my interior, a captured image of my 57 year old life, my well-worn body.

I imagine empty black spaces, and darkness layered over with shadows. I see cavities of uncertainty, and even outright fear.

But there are also hard, bright, white bones and buoyant vertebrae. And pliant, flexible fascia.

Broken or whole, crushed, or pinned back together again, it is a body that holds pain without allowing the integrity to break apart irreparably.

I know I will never walk, or run, or move at all, in the same way. This foot, this grief, it walks with me, it carries this worn and scarred body.

And I think about about regeneration, recovery, and injury and repair.

And I will wonder at the strange, unfathomable ability life has to break down, and then somehow gather itself up, and then re-create something functional, and oh so beautiful, and altogether new.