January 31st, 2022:
It has been a bit since I wrote…many feelings, many cycles, endless days and getting up to do it all again.
My book-stand has been replaced with titles like ‘Healing After Loss,’ “The Tibetan Book on Living and Dying,” “The Wild Edge of Sorrow," rather than the typical ones by Berne Brown, or Being a Badass, Neurodiversity. Now it’s all about loss, grief and that word…
Widow.
So where am I? I am grieving. Healthy, ugly, sad and stricken grief. I am fine and not fine. Even in laughter there is a heaviness in my heart. And yet, I know I will rise to the occasion. I am rising. And it is a beautiful painful place to be.
The opportunity is to love more, to love deeper, to love all things…to find beauty in each moment. Be true to myself and live in this truth. Balance between time and no-time, place and no-place. Time to gather together in grief, for that is how we get through it…not alone. You never know who your angels are, and so with that I say yes to all the offerings. Yes, yes, yes. In this I am transformed.
Each moment…presence. Being present saves me on a daily basis. To simply sit and see a branch sway in the wind, a speckle of spark on the ocean, a cloud take a new formation.
I breathe. Inhale-exhale. A moment has passed.
Grief is cauterizing. It transforms you from the inside. Cleans you and replaces what was with what is.
I keep thinking what an honor it was to love Frank until the end of his life. At the end of his life. That the life I lived with him was his last years. As Lena said…we got 1/12 of his life with him. Ah yes, 1/12. She loves a good fraction.
A fraction…that’s what stops me in my tracks. The end of his life is a fraction of mine.
Like yin and yang, we were complete and opposite together. The mirror of same and different.
I gave him the gift of true love at the end of his life; he gave me the gift of true love for the rest of my life.
Our relationship was one of shadows. We both had them, and our shadows brought the others’ out in contrast. “Oh yeah?! Well I raise that shadow of yours another shadow and some change!!” Yet that’s what we asked for, what we yearned for…the soul who would see us and dig in deep to those icky parts that even our own selves feared to tread. And transform them with love, so much love.
I adored Frank. In our first year together I would just sit and stare at him. I don’t know how he didn’t notice…sometimes he was sleeping, or reading…meditating or cooking. I was actively trying to pattern a new person into my cells…I had found this soul I had searched for…longed for…and recognized deeply. I wanted every ounce of my being to be filled by his presence, to imprint him on my memory so I could find him again in the next incantation.
Maybe then we’ll have children.
Frank was the only one who has ever said to me “I want to get you pregnant; I want to have your babies.” We were far too late in life for that, but even the father of my own daughter never breathed those words…they were powerful, sexy beyond measure.
I fell hard.
We both did.
The other day I touched my body, the parts I find difficult to accept…yet I did it from the perspective of Frank. It felt different. I could feel how from the outside my hangups were from the inside only…not real, but perceived. I am a loving, sacred, luminous being. I am love, and my love is for giving…these are words brought to us by our teachers at the Spirit House, and I finally feel them.
While at the same time I fall to the floor in grief, only to get up and rise again, try again…be present in the moment and be soothed.
The rug has been pulled out from under me, and yet…this absolute low is a new high. That’s the gift Frank gave to me. Transformation through Love. Acceptance. Healing from pain. I gave him the same, and for that I am forever grateful.
