WHEN GRIEF SMELLS LIKE APRICOT TEA

As I searched the sign for the daily coffee list, my eyes fell upon “Apricot Leaf” as the featured tea.

It’s funny how a single phrase can usher in a flood of emotion.

On a whim, I ordered a half pound of the fragrant leaves, breathed in deeply, and was immediately transported back to a dining room table, a teenage girl with angst in her heart, and a stay-at-home, homeschooling mama of boys passing me a hot cup of apricot tea.

That sweet smell meant warmth, openness, and the breathtaking impact of being seen and listened to and known.

There were probably 42 other things she could have done with her time. Her boys would play wildly around us, in and out from backyard shenanigans. I wonder how many young girls they passed over the years, seated at their dining room table, nestling a cup of hot apricot tea.

I don’t remember a single conversation I had with her. Not a single word lodged itself into my memory. Just the tea. And the woman who took the time to hear me.

Years later, I was the homeschooling mama, and I got the call no one ever wants to receive: she had an aggressive form of brain cancer, and her prognosis was grim.

This woman who made time for me, who opened up her home and schedule and heart to listen to my teenage angst was now incapacitated in a bed, with only remnants of her personality still clinging to a weakened frame.

The unfairness of it ate at me. I railed and cried and wrestled.

And then I did what she taught me: I gave her my time and just listened.

When I entered the room, she didn’t know me, my face a forgotten image eaten by cancer, all those conversations over apricot tea seemingly lost to the cruelty of her disease.

And yet, she welcomed me.

I crawled up in the bed, and she shared her angst. The pain, the longing for the end, the fears for her boys, and anything her fragile mind could still articulate.

And then she asked me to sing.

She pointed to a hymnal lying next to her bed, and I opened to the very first hymn. We sang through the hymnal for at least an hour. Tears streamed down her face as she sang every. single. word. The girl she had known for 20 years was forgotten, but these words, so tightly interwoven into the fabric of her faith, seemed embedded in her being in a way nothing else was.

Every hymn spoke of trials, suffering, and pain. And I noticed how each ended with the promise of the Next: Heaven, our true Home.

This shadow-existence that will one day give way to Substance: I was seeing it fade before my very eyes. Her face was alight in a way I cannot explain. She was not crying from the pain; her tears were those of longing. She ached to go Home.

So I held her hand and wept along with her. I felt the honor of sitting with her like she had sat with me so many times over the years. I felt the sting of death and yet felt witness to its impotence. Death held no power over her that day.

She was transcendent.

And all of this flooded back in the scent of apricot tea.

This is grief. It is not the linear process we tend to portray: you grieve, you finish, you move on. Grief is deeply tied to life, to having loved, to having valued. And the value doesn’t end with the life--it is their legacy, lived on through the lives they impacted.

In that moment, tears stung my eyes as I missed her all over again. I felt the longing to sit at her table once more and pour out my heart before a compassionate ear.

I do not grieve out of mere sadness. My grief honors the value of her life. And every time I brew a cup of apricot tea or give it away to a friend, I pass on the legacy of a life lived for others. And in so doing, I am challenged to do the same.

Grief is a powerful tool we have been given. We can hold it in, deny it, dismiss it, or compartmentalize it, but grief, like an underground spring, will bubble up to the surface anyway.

But what if, instead of minimizing or dead-lining grief, we let it do its life-giving work?

To memorialize.

To value what really matters.

To spur on the living.

Have you grieved this week? Do you need to cry, to remember, tell a story, buy some tea? Make space for those moments. Give grief room to do its work.

Or maybe you need to be the friend who makes that space for another--no time pressures, no deadlines, no expectations. Just a listener, a fellow witness to the value of life.