Allow yourself the grace to fall apart over and over again;

give yourself permission to travel into the caverns of the heart, mend your sorrow one breath at a time and

courageously begin again. 

When we lose a loved one; someone so close, so intimate to us that that they seemingly knew us better than we knew ourselves, we shatter.We fragment into a million little pieces of hurt and pain and we slip into a void; into the space between fracturing realities. For some this is an inward journey to a space of nothingness; a dwelling found deep within where we feel vacant, silenced, scared, lost or stuck.  This inner world has many landscapes; some feel small and tight, like there is not enough room to breathe; while others seem so deep and expansive you may just drown in the center of it all.  

When we have been touched by the heaviness of pain and sorrow; the person we once knew ourselves to be, no longer exists. We must learn a new way of being in the world; a way of moving through the spiral of grief and loss while staying open and allowing to love. 

“Grief is a way of loving, love is a way of grieving.

They need each other in order to be themselves.”

Steven Jenkinson

When a significant loved one dies we not only grieve them but who they were to us, who they were to others and how they showed up in the world.  We grieve the loss of our dreams and the ability to build those dreams in a future together that will never come. 

We grieve not only our partner but the loss of self, the loss of our own identity. We grieve who we were, we grieve who we were becoming, we grieve who we have had to become to survive losing our person, thus losing ourselves. We grieve all the words spoken and unspoken. We relive over and over again all the memories; the good and the bad; the ones we waited and waited for and the ones we wished had never come.  We grieve the moments between the moments…you know the ones; the mundane, the ordinary, the times filled with simplicity and ease like the thread that held it all together.

My husband died too soon, it was a tragic and traumatic moment that structurally changed me.  At times in my life I have found myself lost in the cavern of my own heart and the depth of my own despair.  What I learned there was necessary for me to survive.  I learned that I needed to sink and settle into that suffocating space of death; so that I could dissolve, so that I could restructure, be reborn and rise again.  In my experience with grief this is not a one and done sort of thing; it’s a life long journey that you learn to walk along the way.  It’s a spiral of translucent boundaries that ask of our willingness to explore love and loss, while choosing to go on, remain open and create a life worth living.