Reassembling oneself after loss

I think about the repair of tapestries, when chunks of the design are so worn away that a simple repair won't do. When the fabric weakens and tears or falls apart. A tapestry contains a narrative, sometimes metaphoric or coded, and time and environment can erode the integrity of the whole.
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A life can feel the same: a sudden shift, a loss, an absence that can never be replaced. Tears and holes form in the complex design of our lives, a part of the narrative that we recognize gets stripped away leaving a ragged blank spot, each one potentially compounding the next unless repairs are made.
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Repairs to rugs and tapestries are rough at first, as the substrate is woven into place, then the fine work of creating a cohesive pattern begins. In our lives, we often want to jump right to filing in the lost details, covering up the damage. But those efforts won't last without first weaving a new substrate, a framework to bridge the void.
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It starts slowly: a new habit here, losing another detrimental habit over there. It's uneven, with bad patches that need to be redone, slips back into old ways that caused erosion in the first place. We are trying to weave a new thing relatively quickly, without much guidance.
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Much of the tapestry of our lives was woven by our families, our culture, years and years of incrementally unfolding experience that was so slow that we might not have noticed. And seemingly all of a sudden, we are required to make repairs to the ravages of time in the mad patterns of our human lives, to reweave choices that took years to make, to reinforce ourselves so we can keep living.
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Is my own resistance to endings and death anchored in what feels like my own arrested development caused by traumatic events? Each age that I experienced great loss or trauma feels like a part of my substrate was irrevocably cut away, freezing my narrative at age 8, at age 15, at age 23.
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We are meaning-making beings, and damage is unavoidable. In tapestries and carpets, age and wear are part of the value and repair is seen as an art. So I'm thinking about life as tapestry: I can carefully re-tie the cords and weave meaning anew.
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#grief