“The world breaks everyone
and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
E. Hemingway
E. Hemingway
There is much to say about the year or so behind me; both a darkness and a glow to reflect upon. Grief and grace. Love and loss. Redemption and a beautiful new day. I found myself lost waking each day stumbling in circles, mumbling promises that did not belong to me. Those days were dark.
and in the dark, cold, broken, alone
turn your face to the warming light
a harbor to the refuse of life undone
Happiness killed me, and I did not want to be. It is the most peculiarly crushing feeling to not fit into your own life all of a sudden. Comfort on all levels was barely comfortable. Pictures of a life I once knew, faces of friends that we were connected to, a home that we built together and a day manufactured by our love and God’s hand, all broken and all much more unfamiliar. That’s precisely how grief entered in my life. One day life was uninterrupted and strong, full of love and expectation. The next, terrified and haunted by the death of my wife. Then a barrage of blurred days, melted together by pain, confusion, insecurity and fear. I not only lost true love, but faith and God, too. Prayer seemed worthless and superstitious as a result of unanswered desperate requests made as neatly and broken as I could make them. And so, I lost my wife and my God. It must be comparable to waking to a surgeon unexpectedly cutting into your chest to remove only half of your healthy heart. The continual sensation being conscious and aware while only mostly sedated. And then being rushed back into your daily routine while the scars only kept breaking open. The days were long, my strength was short and I was lost with no end in sight. People kept telling me things would change, that life would get better. I resented some of them.
Somewhere along the way, slowly, not like a rushing wave cleansing the dirtiness of loss, pain away, but more like a steadily rising tide that begins to carry you and make you feel lighter, that new day arrived. It will never be a good thing that I lost my wife, but I will never curse the day or dismiss it because the absolute bitterness and the now certainty of sweetness is that some of what I lost needed to be. And the most beautiful and sacred thing that did not need to be was forever memorialized in the hearts of my daughters. She would never want me to wallow and sink forever in the ashes of the life we once had together. It was, but is no more.
There are many thoughts about grief and how it exists in a person’s life; uninvited and unrelenting, but ultimately good. If grief could be a measurement of one’s health or location of how close one is to making it out, then acceptance would be the finish line, but that is just as ridiculous as it sounds. There is no finish line or certificate of completion to grief and loss. I do not think of acceptance as some submissive posture of being okay with death breaking into my life and taking from me. That will never be okay. For me, acceptance as a form of grief and reaction to losing my wife is about recognizing the absolute beauty of what was, as it being special and unique, something all to ourselves, but is no more. Acceptance is about giving myself permission to let that day lie in the past, stand in the depths of God’s grace and allow my heart to open fully again. That day has arrived. I have seen the glow on the horizon while the night was still cold, but now I feel the warmth that that new day brings. In the most fitting of ways, the new day validates and supports my acceptance of what was.
Thanks for following me here for the past year or so, for traveling with me through such a time as it was and for being a depth of encouragement that you may never fully comprehend. This will be the last post that I write here at allthingsdelcambre.com.
My new site will launch later this week. I will announce it here. I hope you continue with us as we move on into love and life.
So in the end, I am not finished, but much more complete.
Thank you. Thank you.
Again thanks for your words, and reflections towards a new beginning.As I've said before your words seem to always speak for many whom cannot or will not speak for themselves.
Let the journey to healing begin.