"Sharing my heart and my personal space with only myself has been the secret to my ability to keep going. My reclusive nature has connected me with me. Connection to me is connection to her, and our path is made from pain."
There are times when I write or create and it has a way of chipping off the sharp edges of my grief. It takes me straight to the moments of last breaths and holding my own breath in ways that force my feelings of sadness to surface and flow. What a beautiful yet gutting healing process it is to feel deeply with a broken heart.
It is as though I’ve held my breathe so long under water that there’s no option but to surface or sink. I’m just not a good sinker. My heart is too willing to find the good. But don’t be mistaken or forget that although I walk the line of grateful on the other side of my line is the steepest of edges with nothing below. Writing helps. Feeling helps. Hurting helps. My first words written were, “I can’t subscribe to your loss when your love is still here.” I still feel this way. I will always feel this way. I will always feel the seasons of grief from weighted heavy hurt like howling wind, to still waters. It’s here. Always.
I held my grief inward and close to my chest for a long time. I took myself and my sorrow and privately stepped inward, to attend to myself in the ways her nurses attended to her and in the same brave ways she fought, rested, fought again, rested again until she could decide to let go. Inside my cabin in the woods of a heart I did the same. It was mine to care for, to get to know, to give my life to, to understand. It was my time alone. Those who loved me without condition understood and waited for me to open my hearts door and invite them in for a hug, a tea, a tissue, but only one person held my space the most. Myself. Those with condition forced upon me their own discomfort to bear witness to work like this. They wouldn’t stop knocking and would try so hard to press their opinions through my boundaries. Telling me what to do and what to feel as though they didn’t trust that I knew every single moment of what I truly needed. I needed to be in pain and being in pain isn’t for the faint of heart to hold space for.
I have never been afraid to sit with myself during these times. I have never been afraid to let myself know that my daughter had died before my eyes. But I was afraid to share. I was afraid of the weight of the pressure and opinions. After all I had sat next to my sister who said of her grieving friend that she was “doing it all wrong”. Was she?, I thought. I was just given a license to unravel by fate. Was she doing it wrong? Or was she doing what she needed, that didn’t fit the bill of opinion?
Sharing my heart and my personal space with only myself has been the secret to my ability to keep going. My reclusive nature has connected me with me. Connection to me is connection to her and our path is made from pain. I would look at my partner and say, “How will I ever have anyone understand what this means.” We are born in a society that does not want to look at this path as the very answer. Pain is too uncomfortable. I was afraid to tell the world that the times in which I suffered the most created an unbreakable bond to myself and this was a beautiful gift from death.
As I sat, me alone in my cabin, I was afraid that contemporary life would take my knowing and twist it into a pill for depression, an unhealthy addiction or anything that wasn’t me and my process. As I sat in the belly of sorrow, were the times I could reach her the most. Why? Because they are the realest moments I have in my time on this earth. Everything else feels so incredibly unimportant. I didn’t want the outside world to break the walls of my inner work and take what was left, my gratitude.
Some days I would pull the curtains of my safe mind back and peek outside of myself to see the world still turning in the same unimportant ways, then retreat back to my comforting pain. But it was a long time before I emerged. I waited until I felt so true to myself that nothing could weather what was right in my own heart, no matter what comes at me.
I share so selfishly yet givingly in hopes that someone can hear my call and I don’t care who is uncomfortable as I echo off the mountain walls. I want this world to know that it is possible to grow from deep troubling spaces no matter what. I want moms to know that the children they kiss good night are not guaranteed to them tomorrow so they can appreciate one kiss, two kisses or 23 years worth. I want the world to hold space for death so the outcome can soften in the ways writing does for me.
I want hurt to feel safe.
Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
~Rumi
With Metta,
L.
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