What value does a human life have?
What value does the life of another have within your own?
Surely we can never know.
We can, however, hold it with wonder.
That for certain we can do.
Chapter I: The Lake Floor
What happens when someone you love leaves this world?
When a living part of your reality stops being there?
The doors open, they pass through, and you do not. Then the doors close and you are left standing, alone. On the other side of uncrossable barrier. Unable to see them, or feel them or smell them or touch them. You cannot hear their voice or experience their laughter. You cannot tell them about your day, the beauty you saw or the heartache you feel. You can’t stroke the back of their neck or nestle your palm against theirs, or feel the warmth of their body touching your own. You no longer experience them twitching softly as they sink into sleep.
Never again will your phone light up with a message from them. Their perspective on life, and particular opinions fade amidst the dialogue in your mind. They will not help you with any more crossword puzzles, or run your bath when you come home having worked too late.
When someone you love leaves this reality, you are struck squarely with the truth of the interconnected nature of your identity as a human being because there is a raw, gaping hole in who you understood yourself to be.
And it is painful to think, and painful to eat and painful to breathe.
Because they actually were a part of you and the rupture of their leaving re-shapes your experience of being alive in a way that feels violent. A whole wing of your only, precious home gone… just gone. Smashed or shattered or simply removed from existence. And while part of you does want to know how this is even possible, most of you doesn’t care, because it is just too inconceivable.
There is no hallway, no floor where there once was, only devastatingly empty space and vague, stale debris. A bathrobe, a letter, a photograph. A lip balm, a t-shirt. The shoddiest of replacements. Leftovers you cling to despite the nauseating feelings they stir. So far from satisfying and yet also somehow better than nothing at all.
And then, strangest and most difficult of all, you are faced with the sheer impossibility of re-building. No wood, nor stone, nor concrete exist that will form the thing you really want.
*
It is interesting to me to reflect back to my mind in the first days after James died. That I experienced genuine seconds of thinking ‘I can fix this…’ or ‘there must be a way to somehow undo… ‘
Only to smash brutally against the strange, new finality of his absence. Finality of that degree was foreign to me.
It took about ten days for those thoughts to stop. Ten full days of parts of me resorting to belief in time travel in order to have even tiny moments of hope. Ten days for my being to fully internalize that this was actually and absolutely not possible to fix. To understand what ‘gone’ meant in a way I did not before.
*
You start to mark time in new ways when you lose someone you love, their departure like the death of Christ, the clock all of a sudden rearranges to tick in both directions from that point.
Each moment passing a small tragedy because it is moving the time when they were alive further and further from where you now find yourself... A one-way train ride forward and away… from them.
Each time you visit a place where you last were when they were alive you feel it. “Last time I was in this place you were alive and in my life.”
“Now I am here and you are gone.”
And you don’t even want to feel better because your sorrow is now the tether between you. This new, terrible pain your only connection to that person you loved so much.
And it fills the remaining rooms of your life. The ruin of their presence a fine particulate filling every space, devastating, mesmerizing. And like the particulate, you too float, suspended, a ghost of yourself because that faded out version is the level of pain you can meet. And time goes both fast and slow. And frankly, you just don’t care.
*
But over time, your heart starts to call to you.
The volumes and dimensions you’ve abandoned saying ‘hey, come back to us. Come back to feeling and 3D life. Come back to the full range of purples and deep greens you know exist’.
And you cry. And you cry. And you cry.
And you avoid, and distract, and get angry.
And you scream with a rage you didn’t know before.
And then you cry some more.
Eventually, you find yourself on the shores of the most desolate lake. Browns and greys, blacks and whites as far as your eyes can see. Alone in bleak totality. And you realize that even though it is going to be unbearably painful, you must enter the water. Because actually, lingering on the shore is killing you. And so, recognizing there is no other option, you start to wade in, the cold water rising against your skin as you walk out. Ankles, knees, pelvis, chest…
And somehow this isn’t water you can swim in, so you sink, and you sink and you sink…
Until your body lands softly against the lake floor.
The sediment stirs around you and your heart calls out with an intensity of longing you didn’t know existed.
And everything goes dark.
But then you find yourself back in your reality. At the kitchen table or out for a walk, a little more vital, a little more colour in your cheeks. And you realize that desolate lake is actually a place of healing. Strange and foreign and still frightening but somehow also a portal forward into Life.
Interlude I
I thought I could save you Babe.
I really, really did. I wanted to so badly. I had myself fully convinced I could and I would.
I thought the degree and intensity of my love would be enough. It just had to be. How could it not be so? And yet, it seems I failed… Did I fail you? Did I fail myself?
Why did you decide to go?
Chapter II: Even Plywood Can’t Stop Glory
So you continue, and even though you still avoid that desolate lake at times, you become less and less stubborn to resist it when it calls.
One day, as you are wandering through your home, you notice something calling from the once-there wing. It isn’t a sound nor visible, and yet you feel it there. You sidle up tentatively and press your ear to the boarded up opening. Your cheek against the grain of the wood, your ear straining for some signal.
And as you stand there listening, both terrified and ravenous for a hint of what used to lie beyond, through the dust and nails and wood, a hand reaches. And with a quiet so soundless and a touch so soft its fingers caress, ever so slowly, your cheek. They trace the contours of your jawbone to then cradle themselves against your heart.
And the love starts to seep in.
At first you can’t tell it’s love… because it hurts so much… the intensity of feeling in your chest beyond what you have known before. And yet, as you listen, and feel and relent to its gentleness, you feel life returning. Not even just returning, but reconfiguring, rebirthing, with a vividness unimaginable.
And you realize that this is your work now, allowing this love in — in the utter tenderness of its complete glory — to allow it in and through and around. You understand that it is for you to open even the most hidden corners within you, of hurt and pain, of tightness and constriction, of shame and terror and loss to to the transfusion being offered here, that this pain has taught you how to receive. And you begin to understand that as you open and soften, who you are transforms. Your heart becomes larger and more capable of meeting and bearing the pain with dignity and honour and without avoidance.
And in that moment you realize that all this pain you have been feeling isn’t to be side-stepped or shoved down into a hardened corner of your torso or left behind nor even moved beyond. It’s just that it is to be held by a heart far larger than yours has been up until now.
And finally, you see the beauty and you see the truth. And the corner of your mouth turns upwards even as tears continue to fall. You shake your head softly in amazement… because now you know for certain, that even the worst kind of pain is still the calling of Love.
Photo by Rux Centea on Unsplash
