Thursday, December 20, 2012

What can we give ourselves today?


It may be too soon.  The grief may still be carving its presence into our being.

But,



if we're ready.   if God is asking this of us.   if it is taking more energy to hold back than it would to let go.   if people who care and understand want us to be here for them now.   if we give ourselves permission, life will ask us to: 
 
~ Let go ~



release the pain
 


My love to all who journey this path, kicking, screaming, limping, crawling.  Someone is here to love us.  Be he or she God, our departed one, our sister, our brother, our Mom, our Dad, our son, our daughter, our friend -  borrow their strength.   Some glorious day it will become our own. 

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Number One in my heart


 
Used to be that my late husband was Number One in my heart.   He hasn't been for quite some time.   

I started fully occupying the 'Number One' bench this summer, after dating had yielded no suitable candidate for romantic bench warmer.  Indeed, in settling myself in on this bench, I wrote here, on August 21st, that Love, not fear, was now going to be in charge of my life. I made a commitment to live in the present tense.  And I assumed my life would be a solo act.  So how strange it was that five days later I became reacquainted with Joe, a friend I knew in New York City three decades ago.   He'd looked me up on Facebook.

Maybe you've read my last post  "Moving forward with the Emergency Brake on".  I've had some time to think about it.  Here's what I'm going to do.

I'm disengaging the emergency brake.  

O.K.  First and foremost, Love exists in the present tense and this is where I want to live.  Fear lives, if you can call it that, in the future.  So I've disengaged that darn brake, and I'm on the road. 

Why did I let two scary 'what if's' unsettle me?  I, or we, can deal with them.  The first 'what if' is my challenge balancing his needs with my own.  I've had no evidence this challenge is a problem.  The second 'what if' is death - one or the other will die first - if this romance blossoms into full love.   I've been there, and don't relish the opportunity to lose one I love again.   But I'll be O.K., with God's help.  Besides, who knows who will die first?  The only way I can figure out how to avoid these two 'what if's' is to avoid loving at all.   So.   Easy choice. 

I'm going to offer part of this bench to the man above.  Will he join me?

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Moving forward, with the emergency brake on






"I'm alone. Who can help me out here? "  I once cried out.

Silence.  I will never forget that relentless silence when he died.  I begged for his help beyond his grave.  Silence.  Nothing.  Occasionally I'd be blessed with a glimmer that he was beside me, but damned if this glimmer was going to help me with something I really needed.  Silence.  Nothing.

Nothing to do but pick up those pieces and "Suck it up, Marine".

Let me tell you what life is like for this widow seven long years later: it is a lovingly crafted system with fewer moving parts, each designed to not overwhelm.  Discipline and indulgence teeter on a fulcrum of faith in God and the ultimate goodness of life.  I don't ask for perfect, predictable circumstances.  That would be dull.  Instead I ask for equilibrium.  After my long fall through hell before and after my husband died, I want peacefulness at the conclusion of each day.

I've long assumed that peacefulness for me requires solitude.   I've actually become a bit of a hermit, enjoying my own projects, my own timing, my own weightless independence.   Though I have felt the longing for union, evidently it's more in the abstract.   My first relationship as a widow was fairly insubstantial and never really threatened my equilibrium.

Now a man has come into my life.  A good man.  With him I feel a caring and a peace.  Peace with someone.  This is new.  I didn't even feel this sense of soul peacefulness with my late husband.  This new peacefulness is also extremely unsettling.  Does this make any sense?  What if I fall in love,  need someone, and lose what life I've created on my own, not to mention, lose him if he dies? I will experience another very hard fall into hell.  It cost me years to recover when my late husband died.  Rationally, I say this could be a long free fall into heaven if I let go. But this isn't how I feel. 

So my hand is on the emergency brake, and my life grinds forward.  This is the best I can do for now.  I accept that God is in charge, and I will try to take my hand off that emergency brake and place it on His.  God has always found a way to flow around, through, above and below a journey to hell or to heaven. 

Does anybody have any advice on this?  I could use some help.