Allow me to repeat myself. Wrote this last week.
Sometimes the fading of daylight signals loss and dimming of spirit and it causes me heartache.
It’s just evening. It used to offer mood, maybe even a melancholy mood, but not this — a crux informed by vulnerability and loss.
Sometimes it’s the wind. (I know! I know I keep pointing this out but you can’t believe how inescapable the wind is).
Today the gusty air blew grief all around me. Season and direction did not matter. Its relentless tempo felt personal, antagonistic.
I am lately better at avoiding some circular thinking that clutches at my throat but today duked it out with this question: what might I have done differently had I known he was only going to live for 30 years? Home schooling? Better, more exotic travel? A condo in Boulder ten years ago?
I turn away — better not to mull on “what if’s.”
But where do I go when the wind demands my attention and the failing light robs me of peace?
This is a hell of a tough journey you’re on … so many haunting questions all the different what ifs. All the why’s!!! I appreciate you knowing that we’re here for you, listening, caring, loving, we cannot stop the winds from blowing, but we can maybe help the winds from knocking you over.
Tina
And the help is so, so welcome. So palpable. Thank you.
It is hard, the end of day, the winds that carry so much… Winds are companions, here in New Mexico. I have had very few days where they do not dance. After a time, you get in sync with their rhythm and as you do,you begin to hear more than movement, you begin to hear voices, snatches of conversations, riffs of loved music so you learn to listen for more…it is hard not to ask questions, to seek answers, to stay standing when you want to crouch, especially when wind dances, surrounding you with melancholy and sadness. All I know to do, at these times, is to hold on and go where I am meant to go, however difficult the journey. The going becomes easier, when as Tina so beautifully wrote, friends surround you with love and caring and you begin to feel that you can stand and face, with no apology…
I love the idea of listening to the wind. This I have not tried to do.
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Wind, what is it? Today I’m thinking it’s a kind of ghosting.
It FEELs spooky.
Maybe your mind needs to ask all the questions before it can settle down. Many don’t have explicit answers. With all you are experiencing in this and your awareness of yourself and thoughts, perhaps at some future point you will help others live through their own grief as you are doing now.
I had a dream months after my husband passed that involved the wind.
Everything was dark and swirling around me. It was a warm, embracing wind. I realized the air enveloping me was filled with his energy and that of all the beings who had passed through our world.
It was a good feeling, peaceful, comforting. Uplifting even.
I woke up and I was on a plane headed for Chicago.
But I’ve never forgotten that feeling from nearly 40 years ago.
THAT wind sounds amazing. Healing. I think you’re right about letting the grief spool out in whatever way it needs to go. I write these things for my own sake. If at some time they in some way help someone else, that is a secondary benefit.
Just by chance I got to hear an interview this morning on my local MPR station interviewing Yiyun Li talking about her book Things in Nature Merely Grow. Not sure if you can figure out how to hear her interview but ishe had so many interesting things to say about living with the suicide of two of her sons.
I’ve seen her book. Determined I don’t want to read it. But I might be interested in the interview.
Tina~ Yes, I found her sooo interesting too. I think it was with Anderson Cooper, his pod cast on grief. I heard it right after Danny died and it really jumped out at me.
Dee~ Those guilt infused what If’s are so hard, but you sure do have good people around you (as seen in the comments here) to repeat as many times as needed to keep getting through. (((hugs)))