As Time Goes By

On Monday of this week, I awoke as any other day, and during breakfast I noted the date and remarked that we were into the final week of February, "finally". 

Something niggled in the back of my mind, something I couldn't quite name, but it felt kind of important. I felt "off" all day long. Yes, I did the usual things with my family. Yes, I looked after myself and my business. Still, something was ... I dunno ... missing.

Not until the phone rang that evening did I realize what it was. Monday, February 24, was the five-year anniversary of my brother Ben's death. 

Free photo from Pixabay

The caller - someone very dear to me - said he'd been thinking about Ben all day and he wanted to call me to let me know it. We had an amazing conversation for a good half-hour. It was wonderful to hear his voice again. 

As he was speaking, it occurred to me that I had almost forgotten this was the anniversary date. Okay, I HAD forgotten.

But my subconscious, even my body, didn't. 

And today, at the breakfast table, I remembered how much I missed him, how lost I felt without him - especially at first - and that even though I would not wish him back to the suffering he experienced every day because of his physical conditions, I truly miss his humour, his talent, his presence. I miss how we would talk about important stuff, how we would sit together and sing and play our guitars together - "jamming" we called it.

Grief takes many forms and each is valid. One never stops grieving a loved one, but the shape that grief takes might change over time. Let me be clear: time does not heal this wound. Time does not heal trauma.  But love?  Love heals. And unconditional love heals best.

I can remember Ben today and honour his memory and his talent. I can smile at the memory of his antics and his single-minded loyalty to me, his desire to protect me from harm, and his pride in me as his 'little sister' ... I can laugh at his old jokes and how he could make people laugh with just a facial expression. I can close my eyes and listen to him sing his songs with me. I can hear him play the guitar - in his inimitable thumb-and-forefinger style.

And I know that someday, perhaps not soon, but someday - I will see him again. And we will jam together. 

The Hollow Place

 Most everyone has at least one hollow place in their lives: a place that has marked them and left them scarred, empty, unfulfilled in some way, and aching. 

For some, it's the loss of a loved one. For others, it's a dream destroyed. For still others, it's a ruptured relationship. There are so many places like that. Even when the wound heals, there seems to be a hole left behind, a place that is irreparably damaged. 

I got to thinking about this as the 9th anniversary of our daughter Arielle's death gets closer and closer. This past July, she would have turned 30 years old. That birthday was a little harder this year than the last one ... for some reason. Grief has no rules, it seems.

Free photo by Ulrike Mai at Pixabay

About six or seven weeks before she died, she sent me a video of herself just ... being her. She talked about what she was doing in that moment, gave us a tour of her surroundings, and talked about missing us and loving us. I've played that video many times, more often lately - the sound of her voice is somehow comforting now.

And even though most times it doesn't "hurt" exactly to realize she's no longer here, there's still that hollow place, the place left over, the healed edges of grief. There's that empty feeling, call it the "new normal" as I've been known to call it, but in that, there is the knowledge that there is no going back. There is only moving ahead. There is only looking for ways to honour her memory. There is the acknowledgement - and the gratitude - that we had here here with us, even if only for a short time. There is the hope that someday, we'll see her again... someday.

But that hollow place remains. If I had chosen to live there, to keep the edges of that wound raw and torn, to torment myself over and over with the fact that I had experienced a loss that no parent should ever know (and believe me, the temptation to do that was real!) I would have been stuck there, unable to heal, unable to move on, unable to live life as she did: with zest, with joy. 

Yes, that hollow place exists. I don't deny it, nor do I deny that there is pain there sometimes, in the most unexpected of circumstances (like a smell, or a song, or a memory). I've learned to accept those as part of the never-ending process of grief, and I feel my feelings and honour her memory.

It didn't come easy. But it came. 

And I guess that if I had any words of comfort to you in your own hollow place, it's that the grief never stops BUT it changes shape. It heals as you move on ... and honour the empty place, as you let people love you in ways you can perceive. Moreover, it's possible to eventually help others with their hollow places because you know what it feels like, and you can allow space for them to feel what they feel and heal at their own pace. You can realize their hollow place isn't going to look like yours, necessarily, but the healing process is the same. Time is irrelevant. But it's LOVE that heals.