Crossing the Bridge: Grief, Uncertainty, and Becoming Human Together

At 10:16 a.m., the text came.
Maddy fell off the balcony.

Maddy is my youngest granddaughter.
Fourteen months old.
Barely twenty pounds.

I texted back:
What can I do?

It’s a luxury, that question.

My daughter gives me tasks, and I take the steps to complete them:
I cancel my client appointments for the day,
pick up the other children,
bring food and clothes to the hospital.
I am doing something.

I know that, sitting in the hospital with her child, my daughter is asking herself the same thing.
What can I do?
And the answers are less clear.

The emergency entrance at our hospital is located across a pedestrian bridge from the parking area.
Crossing that bridge later, I pause.

There is a space between certainty and fear,
a place between the illusion of control
and the deep understanding that reality, as we perceive it, is fragile.
Life can change, end, or begin in the space of a breath.

I recognize this space.

Crossing the bridge, I see images of other passings across that emotional threshold.
I see the times reality came back into focus.

“Everything is going to be all right,”
I reassured myself and others.
We can go back.
Let’s help each other go back from this place.

And I see the times that it didn’t.

Entering the emergency room, I hear medical staff questioning an older man:
“Do you remember falling?
Do you remember hitting your head?”

I see a middle-aged couple—
tear-stained faces,
vacant eyes,
stunned expressions.

The room is full of people.
I know many of them also crossed an emotional bridge to be here,
in what is now a sacred space.

I look down.

Today, it is too much to be here, together.
Tomorrow, or the next day, I will go back to work as a grief and trauma therapist.
I will sit with people who are on that bridge.

But today, I look down.
And I look for words.

All day, as I move through the tasks on the list,
I search for language to hold this thing—

this thing that binds us in our common humanity
and sometimes feels too heavy to carry.

It is what we fear
in our most private, searing moments.
It is what we face together
in seasons of collective loss and unrest.

It is what we avoid—
consciously and unconsciously—
through numbing of all kinds—
not only substances, shopping, and scrolling,
but the excuses we make,
the stories we tell ourselves,
the way we look down instead of up.

And still—
it is what we need.

The ground of compassion.
The doorway to connection.
The source of meaning, hope, and healing.

It lives beyond words.
Beyond doing.

This bridge of uncertainty asks us to just be:
to be present with the whole truth
of who we are,
of what matters most
and what doesn’t matter at all.

To be present with the strength,
the fragility,
the wonder and the terror.

To be fully human.

Even this searching, I know,
is its own form of doing—
the words a layer of insulation from the emotion.

So, much later, finally home,
I stop trying to do anything at all.

I think of her small body,
fourteen months of wonder,
how life can tilt in a second.

I cannot fix what happened.
I cannot protect everyone I love.

All I can do is stay.

With my breath.
and the fear.
and the fierce love
that makes it all hurt this much.

With this sacred humanity.

I let myself feel.
I cry.