I understand that it may become a slippery slope and dangerous business to involve oneself in comparison. However, there are moments where perhaps it resembles a marker, something that might happen for us or not? Igniting sparks of hope and creating glimmers of light to illuminate our next steps.
When my life without my son physically living within it became my reality, I longed for those just a few steps further along on the path. Creating soft footprints that perhaps my feet could slip into and traverse as well. Companions I observed closely not to compare myself to, rather to witness. Noticing what might possibly become my new normal that they were wearing like a second skin.
Year three became a major corner and marker that I rounded within my ongoing healing. I returned to my chaplaincy position and the Divine wasted no time in giving me what I feared the most, an overdose of a young man just about the same age as my son, Douglas. His mother blankly staring into my eyes searching desperately for something, anything to hang her most unbearable, searing pain onto. We stood, facing one another, words not uttered, yet our collective hearts, hers just recently ripped from her chest, and mine cross stitched together with tender tendrils of gossamer wings.
Recalling vividly my third year as I listened to another warrior mother who is discovering her footing and stepping into it without her beloved. I could sense many hands upon her back, radiating a pulsating warmth, gently guiding her to round an immensely significant corner of healing yet again. You see, there are numerous corners and I am unable to recount them all, yet this one was a very significant one for me. I understand it might be dangerous to speak of years in this way, yet ours is paralleling one another and I was nudged to share mine with her. Without an agenda, merely as a guide, a map, a GPS signal that may or may not align with what is happening within her very personal grief/healing path.
To share in this way slowly softens the jagged and soothes the stinging edges of alienation and loneliness that can envelop us. We can even feel this way within our families when our loss is affecting each member uniquely and we’re aching for connection. I could not begin to touch my mother’s sorrow, when my eldest brother shed his earth suit. Hers was a howl of a wounded animal, primal, not consciously able to allow what had happened to inhabit her waking hours for long. I had lost my sibling and an enormous part of my mom with his death. Never for her to be able to return in the same packaging that I had been unwrapping around her for years. This was something I could not begin to fathom, touch, nor contain, until I could in some way when I lost my son. Even then, I respected that our losses were ours and never did she say, “I know how you feel.” Rather, her deep chocolate drop eyes, warm maternal soft, yet strong arms are what embraced and anchored me. Becoming my road map into this foreign land that I possessed no language for, nor asked to ever visit.
Quietly calculating the math in my head, sheepishly admitting to a surge of envy that most likely she would not have as many years to live with her loss as I might? These are the kinds of inhabitants who might come knocking that I’ve been learning to entertain only for as long as needed. I truly don’t envision a front or back door for entry any longer. What has replaced those customary doors is a revolving one. Fewer party crashers have resulted, because they received my memo that they are welcome. Upon entering there is ample room and seating for all. Aloha, means hello and goodbye and one can hear it being uttered frequently now.
“Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.” ~ Rumi
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