Moving On By Linda Berry At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

When you love deeply, and that love is taken from you abruptly…the pain consumes you.

Life becomes an endless series of meaningless details. If you are lucky, you enter the state of blank. If you are not so fortunate, a thousand times a day your heart is pierced by a memory or a smell or a strain of music, or a phrase…or regret about something not done.

Loss is a lesson any sane being will do anything to avoid. The sheer emptiness of it is unimaginably frightening, and, it is inevitable. I sustained a loss so complete that I wished for my life to end. I did not want to face the years ahead of me. I was not equipped to continue. The plug had, in a very real sense, been pulled. My juice was off. I moved about robotically. My life was a flat line. I was breathing in and out. I was putting one foot in front of another. I subjugated everything to my job. I ate enough. I thought just enough. I slept almost not at all…

Years passed. I worked. Then I worked harder. My heart was on ice.

Then I got hit by a car. More specifically my small sub-compact was broadsided by a van going 55 MPH.

When the car stopped spinning I looked down to where my body should have been seated and I was looking at the outside of the car encasing it Screaming. A mouth full of glass. PAIN. FEAR. Crying. Paramedics. Jaws of Life. Ambulance. Hospital. Harsh lights. Pain Meds. Vomiting. X-Rays....Waiting

Amazingly…no bone was broken! Incredulously, after only a few hours I heard them say: “You can go home now.” I was bruised and sore and had suffered terrific soft tissue damage, but I was going to be OK. My ribs had been dislocated from my sternum by my seat belt, and I saw an angel of a chiropractor every day for the following ten weeks, but I had cheated death.

* Breath * I am not suggesting that if your heart has been numbed by loss, you walk in front of a car. I want you to know the lesson I received was, “Live each moment” From that day forward , the “If only” and “ I should have” and the “It wasn’t supposed to be like this ” simply lost their charge. Freedom of movement was slow to return, and it took the better part of a year to be able to breathe deeply without a wince, but when I did return to feeling good, I was eternally grateful to be alive.

I realized that “now” is “someday”, and I started in on My LIST with all I had. I learned to play tennis, and to swim, and to scuba dive and to skydive and I read classics and went the opera. I traveled to Australia and Alaska. I became proficient in a darkroom, started a business, and I moved from Manhattan to Hawaii. In the process, I discovered it was possible to experience joy after the loss of someone I loved deeply.

I gratefully moved on. I shall never forget the light in his presence and the warmth of his smile. I intend to take them on each segment of a long and joyous journey.

When it is the last day of my life, my smile will reflect my joy. I will know what it was to love, and to freefall, and to feel the vibration of a whale song in my bones. I will rejoice in the richness of all the lessons that were mine to embrace.

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