Letting Go

It has been a really long time since I felt like writing. About three years, according to the record. In September it will be three years since I lost my husband. That is such a funny thing to say. I didn't lose him. Not like I keep losing my jewelry anyway. Seriously, I have about twenty widowed earrings. And I currently can't find the ring I had made to replace my wedding ring that I lost. I don't know why I can't keep track of shiny things. I digress, My husband died two and a half years ago and since then I've evolved a bit. A lot, I think. And that is what has me thinking today and why I wanted to resurrect the blog. Someone in my LDS widows group on Facebook posted this poem written by a friend of his:

Clean State

 Let your grief be clean.
Let it be wise and warm,
Bereft of bitterness and blame,
And hollow of all harm.
And when it dies, don’t mourn.

Jonathon Penny

I really like this poem. It is short, succinct. And more importantly it addresses the part of grief that nobody ever explained to me before I experienced it. The part where active mourning ends. And then you have to let it go. You have to move on with your life, and be this wholly redefined person. When, you come to the point where you can't take comfort in your sorrow anymore. I'm pretty sure this part hurts as much as the original pain of loss. Because it means you are finally you again, completely stripped down. It means saying "I" instead of "we". It is the final de-coupling, an acceptance and comfort with loneliness. I don't know that it is ever comfortable to be alone. But I think in this letting-go process, you get to a place where you are comfortable in your own head. With who you are, and where you want to go.

Part of grieving, for me, has meant not being able to read books. And I love books. There is an association that I may have to work out in therapy... or it will work itself out in time. Anyway, last winter I went to see Life of Pi with a friend. I hadn't read the book, so I had no idea what it was about. I literally cried like a baby when Pi said he cried like a baby when the tiger Richard Parker walked out of his life. The tiger was a metaphor for grief. I didn't realize going in to the movie that the tiger is a fairly common metaphor for grief. After I watched the movie, I searched the internet for this poem:

For Jane

 225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

Charles Bukowski

I think "For Jane" describes a part of the grieving process that comes right before letting go. The finality of loss. The idea that even if you used exactly the same molecules and organized them the exact same way, you could never recreate the person you lost. You can never get back what you had. In the movie Pi Patel's journey of grief means surviving in a small boat across the ocean with a tiger that means to destroy him. He has suffered the most profound loss, his entire family is gone. During that phase, that journey, nobody could help him. He had to figure it out on his own. And when he finally reaches the end of his journey, and is being carried off the beach, THAT was the moment he broke down. The moment he had to let it go. And he says, "I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye." Yes! That is exactly it. Maybe because you don't want to hear it, or you can't imagine it ever happening. But nobody ever explains this part to you when you are on this lonely road of hurt. That there will come a point where you're done with grief. And you have to let it go: The desire to put things back the way they were, the fear that if you stop mourning, it means you didn't love hard enough or deep enough. Letting go doesn't mean that you stop loving. It means you know you loved enough, and that love will always exist. It doesn't need tears or sadness to survive. It is waiting for you, whole and complete on the other side.