Hope and Light

Things that were once so simple become mountains of impossibilities. Something as easy as rinsing dishes change in our eyes to a rushing flood of torrent rains. Laundry is the Swiss Alps. Cooking is a brunt pan on the stove because we forgot we were cooking. Driving is not advised. The mind wonders and you can't remember how you got from point 'A' to point 'Z' and you freak. Normal thought does not exist. Conversations sound as though you have been evaded by Aliens. You know the look on your face is confusion when someone who is talking to you, stops suddenly and raises an eyebrow. Your mind wonders from the mundane task at hand and you walk away, forgetting what you were doing.

To the uninitiated, we have lost our minds, our common sense. They put it down to us not moving forward. They think we are stuck in a rut of our grief and give up on us. They believe it should be a simple thing to set our minds to it and just get on with life. We are getting on with life, just not the way the innocent think we should. We have to relearn, readjust, become more than we want to be. We have to learn to live without that special someone. Yeah, our minds are damaged with the hurt. Our body's are taking a punishment for our grief. We don't know, physically, if we will survive and we don't care. I appreciate those who cared in my place. My house was clean, food fixed, problems solved, decisions made without my help. I did not have the capacities to help or the will to care. With effort, I learn to do these things again.

It is a slow, painful and often scary path back to the living. Some of us fight it all the way for in that direction lies more pain, more sorrow, more fear. We don't want to feel anything, be anything. Yet, slowly, our weary feet take us back. We have to literally force ourselves to participate in life. If we wait until we feel ready it is a possibility that we will never enter back into the world for really, we are never ready. Each time I push myself to do something, it becomes a little easier the next time. Not easy, just easier. I don't mean to say to jump back in to what you use to do. A lot of that will not be possible. Where once I loved to watch certain movies, now I will not touch them and probably never will, they cause pain.

There is so much now that brings the pain back full force. It is a matter of deciding what I can handle and what I can't. If I can't handle it, I am not going to do it no matter how anyone tries to guilt me into it. One of the changes in me is that I can't be guilted anymore. A positive in all this negative. If there is one positive there must be more. I will try to find the positive. Not the positive in losing Tim, there is none, but the positive in life. I suppose that is like counting your blessings. Each step, no matter how painful, brings us a little further.

I have questioned what my life will be now. How can I go on for years with this on my heart? I read so many saying that worst of pain never goes away. For me, that is not so. The worst has softened. Not gone but oh so not as intense and all consuming as it has been these long 7 months. Yes, I still lose my breath, I still cry and I still grieve, my heart is still broken. I do not expect that to change. But it has become, milder? I know that is not the word I am looking for. I am not sure there is a word. I started out with no hope, no belief that the light would shine in the darkness ever again. Hope is a funny thing, it can live along side grief and sorrow, carry part of our burden for us, it can exist even as our hearts are so shattered. The light does shine in the darkness, it just shines differently, just as we are different. Hope and light, a chance.