At The Crossroad

It is hard sometimes to climb up from sorrow. We search for any little nugget of light to help us take one more step, survive one more minute. When we can't find it, we fall a little further into the darkness, the distance longer to walk. How deep is this well of despair? Endless are the tears shed, the ache, the loss. It is as though we are in a fevered nightmare unable to break through to wakefulness. How desperately we fight to awaken. The days are dim, twisted and demented. The nights long and horror filled, lonely and alone. We can feel each tear that flows, unable to stem the flood. Our voice echoes in our ears as we cry out, begging for this not to be real or true.

We are now living the nightmare that even our wildest imagination could not have prepared us for. We remember, once, when we heard of others loss, how our breath would catch in our throat, our hearts would race faster and we were thankful that it was not us, not us and we moved on with our daily life. Even then, we were not being prepared for the eventuality for nothing can prepare us for that. In all that we have lived through in our lives, nothing paved the way for this reality. Maybe we have been sleeping and this has awakened us. We are awake to a reality that stuns us, drops us to our knees, brings us to the brink of our own death. Not only are we given death, close and personal, but we also no longer fear our own.

We stand at a crossroad. We can count on both hands why we should remain earthbound and count one reason on the other for why we should leave. That one holds sway over the many. That one reason fills us up so there is no room for anything else. We walk on the edge of living, giving full contemplation to death. We are living still only because our mind is in a fog, in shock, gone with our loved one. We live still because we are in the grip of grief. We wake every morning, move through the motions of life, find footing on rocky ground, but we are not thinking about that. We do not notice that we live for it is a half life that we stand in. Eventually, sound, thought, the world, comes back into our focus and we hate it.

I never hated life before, until I lost Tim. I did not know that love and hate could war so violently, that the world could become an ugly, alien place. It was hard to reconcile to the fact that though I loved many still here, I could walk away from that. That death could hold a higher place then the love I had for others. It filled me with guilt at times, emptiness at others. I stood at the crossroads for a long time, unable to move left or right. I had to go deep within to find that spark that could, if allowed, ignite into the reasons for living. I always thought that if I lost one of my kids, it would kill me. It did. It killed who I was, ripped it all away, left me bare and hurt. We do die when we lose those who we love so deeply.

We have to start all over. Not new because we carry the memories of what was, we carry the pain and sorrow. Each step is agony. I watch the sun rise every morning, tears fall. I fill my head with those I love, the blessings I still have. I use them to push the darkness away a little, to give myself room to breath. I love them as much as I love him. We tend to forget that because the hurt takes over so completely. For a while, we have to let that hurt have it's way to heal just a tiny bit, to make room for those who still need us, who love us. I do not want them to feel the sorrow I feel, to know the reality. I do not want to be the one who makes them feel that way so I step into the crossroads and walk. It does not matter where I am going, it will have to sort itself out. I just know that standing still is not the answer. I will make mistakes and wrong turns and circle around and back again. Yet, I will keep going for now.