April 2nd, 2016 - Kristen Moeller
- 21 hours ago
- 5 min read
It’s my fiftieth birthday. Early spring in Colorado—the air is brisk with a forecast of sixty by the time my friends arrive for my party at 5:00 p.m. But first, my calendar reads 7:30 a.m.: 30 minutes of QUIET to start the day well.
“Quiet” in all caps, so I take it seriously, slow down and reflect.
My first sip of coffee is perfection: creamy, a drop of honey, and a sprinkle of cardamom, cinnamon, and turmeric. A warm dog by my side, I settle into the couch and watch the early morning sun filter through the tree in front of our house, its light dancing with the branches. I tuck my blanket around my shoulders to stave off the chill and take a deep breath.
That morning, I believed something simple: I had survived.
It was a little over a year after my mother's sudden death, and I was still raw and bleeding. No matter when it happens, losing a parent is a rite of passage, a massive upset to our ecosystems. When my beautiful mother—with her cornsilk hair, and cerulean eyes—died, I was stripped of a layer; the one that is supposed to protect me from the world. She was my reference point for love itself, and my heart still thudded like it might split open. But the bleeding had slowed enough for music and a gathering where we would eat cake, share our hearts, and dance with abandon to ABBA.
I believed I’d earned some smoother waters.
And I planned to write about it all—the restless ache that plagued me for years. All the fires I’d walked through. The literal fire: my house burning down in 2012. And the fires of loss: my mother, and then one of my best friends two days before. The promise of a new decade was on the horizon. Fifty. A threshold. The word slips out with my breath.
Fifty is when we’re told we’ll care less about what really doesn’t matter, come home to ourselves—and the age-old angst will finally loosen its grip. We’ll embrace the first wrinkles as hard-earned smile lines, and gray hairs as wisdom woven from all we’ve survived. And I wanted all of that.
That night, candles flickered on the mantlepiece. The etched pine plank floor bore the marks of decades of living, and our early-1900s house seemed to release a sigh. My friends’ eyes shimmered while we sat in a circle sharing our passages from the past year, and each gave me a blessing:
“Oh girl, it’s been a tough one! And look—here you are, still smiling, still our ‘Dancing Queen’—dance on!’” said my friend Red, her hair an amber flame.
“Happy birthday, warrior woman!” Mariea said, her radiant blue eyes meeting mine.
“My Kristen,” Jane said, her voice soft but steady, “you are my sacred soul sister. Wherever your pilgrimage leads, I know you’ll walk it with courage.”
The circle continued around me, each friend offering their blessing. I tried to take it in fully. I knew I still carried patterns that held me back and longed for a wiser gaze and a gentler heart toward my own foibles and fears. I am sensitive, prone to overthinking, and often filled with self-doubt. I was hoping to find lasting acceptance of my nooks and crannies.
#
Ten years later, I look back at that woman, surrounded by her beloveds, dancing in the living room, our favorites blasting through the stereo, and I want to touch my hand to her cheek. The challenges she had already faced and survived, the breath she was beginning to release, the shoulders that were beginning to lower.
I want to say, not yet, love. Don’t lower them quite yet.
In life, there is always more.
I wish I could hold her there, where hope’s strands of light flickered on the horizon.
She believed the storm had passed.
But she was only standing in the eye of it.
#
In 2017, my sweet friend Mariea—who showed up to the ashes of my house for our first “friend date” with sandwiches for the cleanup crew—suffered a stroke and survived, altered but still here.
And, of course, COVID. COVID happened to the world.
Later, Red, who taught me to shimmy my hips and ease my mind, faded into memory loss, taking the easy intimacy of our friendship with it.
Between 2021 and 2023, I walked a gauntlet I could never have imagined:
Almost losing my brother to addiction, then losing the relationship to the buried trauma we both carry. Losing my father to dementia—and my soulmate dog to old age. Facing two cancer scares, only to be left with the invisible march of chronic lung disease.
And somewhere in it all, a buried childhood memory surfaced, taking me to the edge of sanity—so close to losing my mind and soul that I wondered if I might never find my way back.
And then, twenty-six days before my sixtieth birthday, my sacred sister Jane—who grounded me with her fierce presence—passed, less than two months after her cancer diagnosis, leaving us all whiplashed. She met it with beauty, grace, and dignity—on her own terms.
I am still learning how to meet it, too.
#
On the threshold of sixty, I begin to find what I am looking for—but not in the ways I expected.
I am learning that beauty is braided through loss.
That sorrow is holy, holy ground.
And now, I (mostly) love the arroyos that tears carved in my soul.
The unbearable, it turns out, was part of the pilgrimage to what is most alive in me.
I walk toward the limits of my longing.
And I see that my tender heart is not the problem.
It never was.
And I learn that my heart can break, crack open, and bleed—and I still dare to love the world.
