This evening on the way home from a day of appointment, errands, and a family visit, I finally put in the CD of John's music that he'd recorded and put in our safety deposit box. I found myself singing along, smiling, raising a hand in worship at times, and thinking deeply about what a journey a life can be. What we are truly building as we go is a Soul, that mysterious inner being that is so connected to heart and mind. With the building of our Soul, we become our own three-in-one self.
Fact of Life: When you lose your husband, the world expects you to step up and adult even if you don't want to, don't feel like it, are anxious about it, or dread it because it's dang hard stuff you must do.
And it sucks.
But you get up each day, and you do it anyway, because no one else can do it for you. Oh, they can...But how selfish to expect anyone else to stop their lives to do it for me simply because I feel lazy or low, or fearful, or whatever else emotion I might cough up. I mean, they all have things they must deal with and attend to and face their own loss at the same time...surely, I can do just as much.
Does Loss count as a big emotion? By definition it is not. The emotional response to loss is grief. You grieve over a lost mate, a lost pet, a lost job, a major change in life, losing anything that you valued or held dear. Grief is the big emotion. But purportedly loss is what has happened to you, not what you feel. So.
I cannot determine if I am numb, or if this past year, all the conversations John and I had, all the things we did to secure our future, my future, so prepared me for what lay ahead that I've accepted that easily that I am now alone. I have discovered what it is to experience loss of someone who was so much a part of my life that I truly felt he breathed out and I breathed in.
In March, as I worked through big emotions and sorrow, I wrote out the posts and pre-scheduled them to publish. I finished them a week before John died. Since then, I've been doing a lot of writing. The two posts published on this blog and on Blue House Journal about John's passing, posts for April, in my journal.
Writing being the cathartic exercise that it always has been for me; I'm finding my way as I go into this new season of life alone mostly by writing, not by word or book. I don't know what it is I feel. I'm having to stop and exam it as I go.
1. I promise to start reaching OUT to people when they are reaching out to me. John and I tended to be selfish with our time together. There's no one there for me now. I'm not slighting my children. They are being so supportive and would happily fit me into their lives even more than they did in the past. But they have their lives. I owe it to John, I owe it to them, and most of all I owe it to me, to not give in to the easy thing. I need a new support system; one I'll build for myself. I need to be open to people and stop thinking everyone is highly suspect and likely to hurt me.
2. I promise to choose carefully who I allow to enter into my life. That may sound contrary to the first promise but it's really an extension to it. I attract needy people. People are attracted to my co-dependent nature. I want HEALTHY personal relationships in my life, not someone who will reduce me, use me, trap me in their dependency.
Sorrow sits at the bottom of the deep river of all unplumbed emotions. Grief, despair, hopelessness, anger, shame, hurt...They are all mixed up in sorrow and get dredged up to cloud the water and alter the current's flow. This river has a power of its own, moving at will along the path it carves.
Many times, when I lie down to sleep, when I just start to drift, I see a very real flood behind my eyelids, sweeping me along with it, sometimes confined within riverbanks, sometimes spreading rapidly across the landscape of life. I have no control whatsoever over my vessel, swept along without any way to stop it or slow it, completely vulnerable to the whims of the water beneath me.
Sorrow, I know.
When I first began this journey, it began with a dream in which I appeared unclothed before a crowd. I walked without any embarrassment or sense of shame, quite at home in my own skin.
But the most often experienced emotion I've felt over the past few years has been shame. I've written about it both in my journal and here. I've examined it until I have felt I was going to go mad. I've ignored it only to have it rear up and strike at me hard.
In Week Three of The Artist's Way, two of the emotions we examine more closely are anger and shame. Today I want to delve into the emotion of shame as I have experienced it.
This weekend, the unexpected happened. My husband, who has never been seriously ill in all of our thirty-four years together, who never needed to see a doctor for anything but routine labs, died.
In the midst of the month when I've had big emotions, when I've written and have upcoming posts already written about big emotions, this comes into my life. Nothing you've read prior to this and nothing you read after this for the month of March is about the most mysterious thing of all, and that is Joy.
Yesterday I was a married woman. Today I am a widow.
As a child growing up in what at best could be described as an angry household, anger was the most punishable offense we children could commit. Looking back now, I find that ironic to say the least. Why should it be so?
It was how anger was handled in our home that seemed rather messed up. No slamming of a bedroom door, no raging at the adult who was calling us out on our actions. That part was reasonable. What was less reasonable was the expectation that we'd show no emotion at all, never admit or own to any anger at any time. Injustices were to be suffered in silence, without speaking up. If we did, then we were punished physically as well as with verbal and emotional abuse. We were meant to simply accept the situation and immediately correct our actions to suit the controlling adult. All anger you see, was seen as disrespect. And disrespect was always followed by punishment.
The other day I was listening to a sermon, a very good sermon I might add, but also a difficult one. It was difficult because it opened up within me a world of painful memories. The pastor spoke about his childhood, a disappointing childhood, a hard childhood and how even at school he found himself compared too often to another boy, one whose family life was stable, who hadn't the things against him that the pastor was experiencing in his childhood life. The pastor spoke of his hurt, his loss of hope, the sense of never being enough. Indeed, not just feeling he would never be enough but being told by grown-ups in his life that he wasn't enough. Not smart enough. Not responsible enough. Not good enough. Not stable enough.
As I write, it is the first week of March. I restarted The Artist's Way about two weeks ago. It is my second time through the book. To date, I have yet to go on a single artist date. I'll wager by the time this post is published I'll still not have gone on one. The dates are meant to be a mere two or three hours carved out of a week, and it's supposed to benefit the Inner Child, the one who is the true Artist Within. What's more, I made a promise to myself for March that I'd go on one Artist Date each week, as the author requested. I don't want to break a promise to myself but by the same token, I don't want to go on an Artist Date either.
What is the issue?
Ecclesiastes 3 has always been one of my favorite passages. The whole book is a favorite of mine, but most especially Chapter 3:1-8. ...
