In the Small Hours
The landscape of my grief journey is changing.
Much like the change of seasons.
It’s more internal now. Reflective.
And each day it feels more real.
Sown deeper into my skin.
I’m in the part of this journey that means learning to live with this level of broken-open-ness.
Learning how to carry cell deep heartache as I move through the world.
A fusion of loss and life has begun.
The shock of it all. The fleeting ups and downs are coming to an end…
now culminating in one long stretch of days.
Bleeding love.
That’s ok.
That’s where I am.
At the crossroads of then and now.
I’ve asked myself how do I explain this spot?
How do I share what it’s like to carry on?
It’s little like an amputation has happened.
Though I’m not sure which part of me? Maybe a little of all the parts.
A place inside where I feel emptied. Forcibly poured out of essential nutrients.
The occupation of his person inside my physical makeup is gone.
The space of care for his body’s well-being replaced by shadows.
That isn’t real anymore. He isn’t here.
Though oddly I feel the size of both my heart and soul have increased.
Enlarged, not diminished.
Access given more freely, to dimensions once unexplored.
Now begins the long journey of learning to live without something most precious, most gigantic…
in the small moments.
In the boring, and the mundane.
In the grueling essence of time marching on.
Living without someone who was a leading cast member in the characters of my story.
It shifts the narrative not just for me, but the complex inter webs of people he impacted. A whole constellation changing shape.
I didn’t just loose my baby. I lost an entire field, full of possibility.
A living Legacy.
I didn’t just loose a literal part of my body.
I lost a funny, artistic, loving, loyal, friend and ally.
A layered, complex, incarnate, soul partner.
The space he occupied bigger words can impart.
I have no idea of how to write this next part.
How to go forward without this ever provoking piece of my heart.
And isn’t it funny that we think we are the authors at all?
It’s clear now that we are not.
And so, I remind myself that this next part won’t be written.
It will be endured, for now.
And hopefully one day lived to the full.
This part is the work.
The chop wood, carry water.
Of aching, doe eyed, longing.
Wake up,
show up inside the soreness of loss,
sleep.
Moment by moment.
It’s like trying to seed fallow ground.
To coax life from death.
The way a charmer entices the snake.
By playing to the snake’s own desire to move.
But only from the depths of what is true.
And never what is fake.
This spot has been a period of deep, deep, revelation.
Resulting in revulsion to anything untrue.
Anything devoid of meaning.
And what I’ve found is so much of my time previous, was spent on something frivolous.
Things that didn’t matter.
So with this death the song of my soul has changed.
Use me. Use me it sings.
Let me be devoured by what is important. What matters. What has consequence.
That’s all I can bear. That which rings with the clarity of truth, beauty, love, and purpose.
Right now I cannot abide the meaningless of excess.
Only the rooms that have pain, grief, and Eros
For it is from the vitality in this kind of grief that I am nourished.
A certain kind of yet to be filled, emptiness.
Art By Laura McPhee
