So my favorite thing in the world is when someone gets me to thinking.
Thinking about life and people and struggles and triumphs. They are the golden thread that tie us together. Carefully stitch the hours of my day to the minutes of yours.
I was taking down Christmas the other night and I was moving things around and carefully dusting them off and those moments that followed me around that night were very capricious.
It is sad enough to be taking the holiday down, but to find yourself being carried down a memory lane when you are not expecting it…..is tough.
Alan’s mother gave my children a picture of their father for christmas. Each little frame captured the smiling face of their father, a little reminder of him to sit upon their bed side tables and watch over them while they dream.
I was grateful to her for that gift, but at the same time I could not bring myself to look at the picture.
I am the one who took it. While standing at the top of a fern laced mountain wrapped in the moist air of Hawaii. I remember telling him to say “hula girl” so he would smile big.
Well as it always is….mother fate held cards that I could not see and she gingerly played them when I was least expecting it.
In my cleaning I picked up the frame and dusted the glass and in that moment, our eyes caught. I looked into that silly little frame and got caught in the eyes of the man that I had loved for most of my life.
In that second he was there….and the familiarity of him flowed upon me.
The house was quiet and the kids were all in bed. The moon was hung just outside the livingroom window and I was there, alone……except for Alan.
In his eyes I was carried back to when we were dating, the night he proposed, the moments we laid in bed and laughed till we could not breathe and tears bled from our eyes. Long hot afternoons when I would watch for his car to pull in the drive….the million and one times during the day I would try to think of something I needed to tell him…..just so I had an excuse to call and hear his voice.
My Alan…..I remembered.
All of those feelings come rushing in as the flood gate that is distraction usually keeps them at bay and I found myself suddenly sobbing.
I could not breath. My body crumpled to the floor as a rag doll and I held that picture in my hands, looking into those eyes and I just let it all go.
My body physically hurt from the release. It hurt from hours and days and weeks and months of pushing the pain somewhere where sting could not be felt. But as with all things…..it must come to be.
You have to feel it and lay with it and cry with it….to allow it to go.
So that night got me to thinking. There is a balance in this world, there is.
So those moments of such tremendous suffering and sorrow and pain must be balanced. There is a reason I am here walking this path. There are lessons that I have learned and things to share with others and my job is to learn, to watch, to grow and to be able to take the lessons of my life and use them.
Wouldn’t it be a shame to suffer and hurt and endure it and then take all of the lessons and just sneak off to my own little corner and not share the lessons so that someone else might learn something and not have to wade through the same darkness.
If I can look at another and say…I know where you are. I know how you hurt. I know how you feel….to be able to to that is an immense gift and to that I say….. give me more. Teach me more. Lead me through more.
My courage and strength are enough. My heart that longs for better not only for myself and my children but for all the people I love….is enough.
These moments of our lives are gone in the twinkling of an eye. Almost two years since Alan took his life. Two years.
The thing to remember is that life marches on….ready or not. Two years and then three and then five….they will pass. It is you deciding where you want to be when that time is up….that is your choice. I know that I never want to look back and see a weak girl who did not give the very most she could give….
I just wrote a dear friend and I am going to share the words I wrote…..”I know this sounds incredibly silly…..but when I have no money and I am stressing about bills and braces and house payments and money….that is when I give a 20 dollar bill to the homeless guy on the corner. When I am so tired I think i will die…that is when I go shovel my neighbors walk…..when I dont think I can possible take another breath I go run six miles.
Just to remind myself that I am alive. That I in fact am here for a reason. That I am much stronger then I ever knew and that this life is worth living….and worth living well.”
That is the gift tucked deep in the matters of the heart. The gift we all have been given. The gift of learning to survive, and not only survive….but in not only saving yourself….save another.
