When a parent dies in old age it isn’t unexpected, it is something, you think, you have been preparing for. Reality is different. You remind yourself that you have been living and being present with a dear loved one and death was an abstract thought not a real moment. Emotions flow and you find yourself weeping rivers of tears through a gaping hole that has opened in your heart. Loss is deep and what was buried has erupted forth emerging into a landscape that is familiar and altered at the same time.
Welcome to your life while grieving.
At peace, at rest, lived a good long life, free of Alzheimer’s, great memories to comfort, joining loved ones….you will say and hear so many of these lines. You will rotate them, meditate on them, chew on them absently as a volcanic rise of emotion erupts and continues to spew the burning lava of your soul. Your attempts to control this will be a drama unfolding with unwilling actors who have accidentally stepped into your theatre expecting to be the audience, instead they become thrust onto the stage, expected to give a perfect performance without any rehearsal or desire to be in the spotlight.
You are the audience watching it all unfold and you are the director throwing twists and turns in every moment to see if each person is worthy of staying in your theatre.
Expect to be disappointed in all, including your own shell that appears in every scene. Expect the actors to be confused by your directions, unable to interpret your erratic commands. Expect yourself to give a robotic performance, one distracted by the waxing and waning of anger, sadness, emptiness.
Expect your drama to continue even when all have left the stage. It was always meant to be a one-woman play. The critics (yourself), will call it confusing, melodramatic, dishonest, sappy, pointless, dull. No matter, you will ignore the criticism and continue letting it all flow, finding paths unseen, gurgling streams of hot molten emotional lava to violently alter your inner landscape.
You will live an alternate life of home, work, community that keeps a rhythm going, a beating heart, a space to retreat when the lava gets too hot to bear. Familiar and predictable will be chased down and chained to your existence.
It’s okay. It is the ebb and flow of living while grieving. You are meant to go this alone and at the same time be surrounded by supporters. Expected, unexpected. Joy, sorrow. Anger, numbness. Giving, receiving. Faith, fear.
Love is what is flowing, scarring your life with its healing powers. Let it flow and know that every scar is one that is leading you home where you will find comfort in the certainty of a loving existence in an uncertain next step on the journey.
My familiar….getting outside and taking pictures.
