Daggers

Lost and Found October 29 2009


We leave behind us, scattered on life’s path,

Possessions, cherished friendships,

Images of who we are and what we have.

Some losses are like catastrophic landslides,

Blocking roads forever, forcing detours,

Weighing down our forward progress,

Making mountains where none had appeared before.

We slowly pick our way

Through their debris, our dismay, the added burdens.

But as we go along, we also find new treasures.

We make new memories, embracing what we’ve learned.

We emerge as other selves – different than we’d planned,

But estimable nonetheless.

“Lost” and “Found” – milestone markers on our road through life.



Reflections

As I ponder the nature of my grief from losing you, I see how, as you always said, each time we grieve, it’s for all our past losses.

I think about how some of these past losses, as your death has done, stopped me in my tracks and took years to move beyond. Being sent away from the convent haunted me for a decade or more. All I could think of was how I longed to go back. I dreamed of becoming a nun again. I felt cheated, deadended. The life I'd planned was not going to happen, and I grieved its loss.

I went on living. I learned much, becoming steeped in French culture, and then, having returned to the US, getting married, starting my teaching career, having a daughter. But it took hypnotherapy to allow me to revisit my grief within what felt like a safe framework, to spend time feeling it, and, finally to accept it and let it rest.

Nevertheless, I remained very attached to preserving my own sense of who I was in this new setting. I experienced similar deep grief again when I was laid off with no chance of continuing in my chosen career as a French professor. There was no market for foreign languages or foreign language teachers in the late 70s in the Midwest. I became a teacher of writing instead, because that was the opportunity that existed. I hated it for several years, before finally starting to find ways to express myself and to make what I was doing meaningful for myself and others.

One good friend died, and I dreamed of her for years. Slowly, my grief became less immediate, but she still occasionally visits me in dreams. Each time, her visits provide deep consolation and incredible peace. I awake longing to have her with me again. It happened again last night. We had loved each other in the early 1960s. This is 2009, almost 50 years later! Love really never dies. 

Another friend died, and then another. Renewed grief, and more people who console me deeply when they visit in a dream.

A sense of failure when I had to take early retirement because I was burned out and worn out – more dreams of going back, with repeated lack of success. More years.

Grief for a marriage that had not worked, no matter how hard we had both tried for decades.

And now, my grief for losing you, in which I sometimes feel desolate, abandoned, standing tattered, by myself in an endless wasteland -- frightened, vulnerable, scared of what will happen to me alone.

I also shared your griefs while we were together – your grief for past lost relationships and for the strength that allowed you to develop your uniquely compassionate and demanding career; your overwhelming lifelong grief about being disabled, marginalized, gay, having to fight to be understood and accepted, straining under the burden of "feeling like a freak,” of having to hide your real feelings, struggling always to keep up, having it take twice as long for you to do what everyone else seemed to do in half the time with half the effort, because you only had half the number of hands as most others. I shared your grief at losing your ability to do anything you wanted with your one arm, making it “work like two,” as your “good shoulder” wore out and gave way.

Our grief at your impending death -- which would separate us when we both desperately wanted to remain together—was shared. It was ours, not yours or mine. And then, unexpectedly, after we had prepared together for so long for your death, I was knocked into shock when you actually left.

I am moving on, and it will still take years before the sharp edge of this grief has softened somewhat, before your memory will mellow into deep joy on the few occasions when you visit with me in a dream.

This time is also different. I have a life’s experience with grief. I know that even though it plunges daggers into me regularly, the blades don’t do permanent damage. In becoming used to the dagger thrusts, I am also finding new insights and new depths of joy, paradoxically. I know that, as we changed each other’s souls irrevocably during our time together, we will remain deeply connected. You are still with me. I can go on with my own life as our engagement with each other continues. I am becoming more comfortable with this new person I’ve become through your influence. Your gifts to me bear fruit.

And I’m also actively seeking to learn all I can from our love for each other and from the miraculous time we were blessed to have with each other. I'm no longer content to wait passively just for the occasional random dream. 

Rosemary: Is Love aCruel Prank? November 14 2008, nine days after Ellen’s death

OK – Let’s see how this works.

We need other people.

We need love.

It’s more important than anything.

When we develop friendship, companionship, relationship – we feel happy and fulfilled.

Our life curls comfortably around our connection with the Other,

Which is really a connection with our Self and with the Divine --

With all of universal love.

We share suffering, joy, laughter, waking and sleeping, relaxing.

Then our life gets yanked away – the Other dies.

We sit in shock, wondering how to go on. Our life is broken.

Something doesn't make sense.

If love is not forever, why do we experience it?

It renders our life splendid, worthwhile -- But then it seems to end!

Is this a cruel prank, or does love continue?



Reflection October 29 2009 —Continuation…

The first anniversary of your death will happen next week. As I’ve pondered it, and wondered how I would endure, my concerns have softened, and I’m actually looking forward to marking a milestone, and to moving into the deeper sense of joy and connection that will undoubtedly result, as it has each time I’ve looked into this chasm and taken a deeper love away.