Grief Timelines

The “feel” of death has a strange emotional timeline.

The moment we learn of it, an arrow pierces our heart. We may bowl over in screams of agony, if the death was unexpected.

Yet, we are still so close to the last hello, the last hug, the last caress of the cheek, the last “I love you”.

So in the mix of the most startling pain, we can reach back to yesterday, where life still sparkles and vibrates and a visible horizon exists.

As the days March on, we move further and further away from “the last time”.

The pain isn’t necessarily sharper. It’s burrowed in now. Its bone deep. Embedded.

There’s a terror to it. A REALNESS. Because we begin to realize that forever is such a long time.

And to have to face every day, for the rest of our lives, without the sweetness that they bring to it, is a jagged pill to swallow.

But I think the deeper terror is that life has seeped in. It’s got us. The thing that happens to everyone else, has just happened to US.

That theoretical thing out there has just become an experience we now own. We now have to walk through this for ourselves, and to be honest, we will largely do it alone. It’s our solitary journey.

But to honor the one we love, to give them peace in the healing they chose, we will walk through it.

And so each new morning is filled with dread. As we wake from the sleep where they still are, to the day where they are not.

Our entire mind, body, and soul, is filled with them. A love so big, so expansive, and full, that one body can’t contain it.

I understand fully when they say that “grief is love that has no where to go.” That’s exactly right.

But it’s also a bubbling cauldron, full of other things too. Yes love, but also regret, and should have’s, and if only’s, and longing, imagination, fantasy, questions, real bargaining, trying to understand physics, unreality, physical pain, existential pain, with the base of this brew being tears.

There’s the searching. The looking for signs and synchronicities. The messages from the beyond. The plea to know that they are ok.

And then madness that we already do know they are ok so why do we need the messages, why aren’t we at peace, why the mad merry go round?

There’s no escape. There’s no way to fix or resolve this. There is only the isness of all encompassing loss before us.

No way to wiggle or squirm out of it. No bypass, no under or over pass. The only choice is to be in it. Be with it. To be inside of it without moving. Plan-less.

That’s it, if there is a lesson, which I’m unconvinced there is at this point. It’s: Reality. The realness of it all. It breaks all illusion, and offers no solution but to just be with it. The hardness of it. The impossibility of it. That will one day, if we persist with being fully with it, will give way to the newly possible.

* I have to write. It’s what I do. It’s who I am. If I don’t write about what is happening to me, what I am noticing, I won’t be ok. I know most of you come for the astrology. And I promise we’ll get back to that, so please bear with me on this detour with The Queen of Death. She obviously has something she needs to share.

Artist unknown. I chose it because I feel it.