Today is the saddest day of the year.

On the Jewish calendar, that is.

It is Tisha B’Av, and to be honest, it’s a slightly obscure observance compared to more “popular” holidays like Chanukah. It commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE and 70 CE respectively, in wars first with the Babylonians and then with the Romans. It’s considered a day of communal mourning for Jews, and those who observe it spend it fasting and abstaining from pleasurable activities that distract from the sadness of the day. Here is an article that shares more about Tisha B’Av for anyone who’s curious.

Long story short, it’s a day where we are supposed to let ourselves feel our feelings. I chuckle to think that my therapist would actually love the point of this day.

Even if it weren’t Tisha B’Av today, I’d have a case of the sads. Today is my mother’s 73rd birthday. Not that I’m celebrating. Still, there’s this sense that today is a day where something ought to be going on…but it isn’t. I’m also still sitting with the grief of three different losses in the last week or two — a teenage boy I used to babysit when he was very small recently passed away in a freak accident, my best friend’s husband passed this week after long-fought health battles, and this Saturday I’m attending the funeral of another friend’s father. Lots of loss. Lots of sadness. Grief begets grief, my therapist likes to remind me; in other words, feeling grief about something can remind your body of other times it was carrying those feelings and bring up old pain. Which it has. This week I’ve found myself thinking about everyone and everything I’ve lost in my life, and I’ve had moments where I felt like I was drowning in it. Luckily, I know how to swim to the surface of my emotions; unluckily, that usually involves me thinking my way out of it rather than feeling my way through it, mostly making excuses that it wasn’t a convenient time to have my feelings. I mean, driving home from my daughter’s violin lesson is reasonably inconvenient, I need to be able to safely navigate the highway without tears blurring my vision. But in general, over-intellectualizing as an avoidance tactic is an overflexed muscle of mine.

So, here I am, trying to unflex that muscle. Tisha B’Av is as good a day as any for that.

So much loss. Loss of people, loss of history, loss of shared experience, loss of memory, loss of future…it’s so much to hold at once. I think the benefit of Tisha B’Av as a communal day of grief is that you don’t have to hold it all by yourself. I also think that one of the hardest things about accepting loss is that you need to acknowledge that change is at hand. Grief means reconciling what you once knew with what will be different moving forward. Of course that process is painful; change typically is. What I understand now, though I still struggle with bringing theory into practice, is that the pain needs to be felt, it needs to be not only acknowledged but sat with. That doesn’t necessarily mean you spend a day in bed, sobbing your eyes out and eating your weight in ice cream (although maybe for some people it does). It means that you pay attention and tend to yourself. Pain will make itself known to you sooner or later, and if you ignore it, it will show up where and when you don’t want it to. Sit with it now as a rabbit, or face it later as a bear.

Take it from me: facing a bear hurts like hell.

Today, I sit with my sadness, and know in my heart that it’s part of the process, and I have to process all the parts. Today, I wear my jewelry I bought last summer in Jerusalem that features Roman glass, a poignant reminder that in spite of the destruction of our holy Temple, we as a people survived while their empire did not, and we put proof of their failed domination into ornaments for decorative use. It helps me remember that there is an “other side” to this grief. There’s a soft place to land out there…somewhere…someday.

It helps to remember that letting yourself feel shattered can lead to something beautiful in its own right.