Barren Land

It is difficult to express what this emptiness is. You look out on your future and all you see is a barren land. There is nothing. The landscape has been wiped clean as though a bomb had exploded and cleared all the colors, the animals, life. Your mind begins to shy away from looking to the future, after all, you know that futures are not real now. It can end at any moment. The death of your loved one has shown you all too completely the true reality of life. It's hard enough to think to the next moment. The silence, loss, sorrow encompasses this world as though it were surrounded by a sound proof bubble and you're trapped inside, alone. All is lost, nothing gained in this arid desert. No one can help you, you're on your own. A heart, once so full of love, brims over with fear as you wait for the next shoe to drop. You know pain now, it is like nothing you have ever felt before and you know that it can hit you again. Is this the future then?

If all it took was strength to move forward, we would run at a fast past. Strength has nothing to do with it, it takes will power, something we don't have in the beginning. As the months pass some normal feelings, needs, wants start to slowly emerge again. We push them back for that way lies pain. We are closed off to the outside as grief ravages our soul, scrubbing it raw. There is no room inside our hearts as the fire of sorrow burns so hotly. Eventually, that fire burns down some but it is never gone completely. Heaping buckets of tears will not put that flame out. One day, it is manageable, the next it is out of control. Longer periods of time will start to pass between tears though the tears inside never cease. Without realizing it, we have picked ourselves up from the dry, hard, fruitless ground. We have started our meandering path across a barren land without a ;map to guide us..

Tiny shoots of green have pushed up when we weren't looking. They are the seeds of hope. The idea of hope makes us angry for what hope is there? They are gone and it is so final, a brick wall without a door. We don't know that we have been living on hope this whole time. We hope that they are safe, without pain, happy. We hope that we will see them again one day. We are actually full of hope. If we knew. without going on faith, knew without a doubt that all these things were so, would we be able to live with a little more ease? Less guilt that we are still here and they are not. Would we look more to tomorrow instead of surviving the moment? We are at a place now that either we learn to acknowledge hope or wither without it. No, we cannot bring them back. But we can believe that when our time comes, they will be standing there waiting, their hand reaching for ours.

Right now, the land is featureless, colors faded to grey, but the paint brush is in your hand. You have to reach deep, so very deep to find the will and desire to move sideways from your sorrow. It's your hand that will put the color back into your world. The colors will be different. Our world is different. We are different. This world is full of ones like us, the scars slashed across their hearts. There are more who are disfigured this way than there are of those who are not. We each understand others pain, just not the depth and scope of it. Scars we will carry forever, some more healed than others.

It is so hard to explain this emptiness, the silence where one so loved once stood. Everywhere the eyes can see is the shadow of one who should still be here. There is a woman who inspires me. She lost her little girl many years ago, before there was the internet, help groups, people who could be a shoulder for her aching soul. In these years she has managed to water those little shoots of green and bring them to fruit. Her landscape is full and lush. Yes, she has tears for the one she loves, but she gave herself hope. She reached and found reasons to continue on. She loves her child no less than I love mine. I cannot be her, but I can hope because of her. I know, in my heart, that there are others out there who are watering their seeds of hope too. I also know there are some who cannot find the stream to bring the water to the seeds. I am looking for a waterfall, the grandest to ever flow so I can landscape this barren land. With all my love from a 'Forever Mom.'