I’ve been unwell with a health issue affecting my heart. A battery of tests, the outcome and proposed treatment protocol currently unknown, has left me not only excessively tired and needing to rest, but more reflective than usual about the events of the past few months, which have also included other health issues. And for some obscure reason, I kept finding myself thinking back to the time my husband died.
The memories of that experience have never left, especially those moments when I railed at life, hating it to the depths of my being because it continued onward, seemingly ignoring he indescribably painful void which had filled my life. I wanted time to stop, believing if it did then I wouldn’t be ignored. I wanted life to mourn with me, to pay homage to the dead as I did, to hold me in its arms so I could lose myself in its embrace. How could it continue when my world had been ripped apart? How could it carry on when I couldn’t?
But nothing stopped. People around me didn’t stop, the rising and setting of the sun didn’t stop. Time didn’t stop, and life didn’t stop. I remember wondering how life could be so oblivious to someone whose own life had been so profoundly changed, whose own life had been so othered by death?
Over the following months I finally came to understand an important principle. Irrespective of what had happened to me, irrespective of the deep grief and sorrow I could never give words to, irrespective of my suffering, I had to make a choice. I could remain outside of life enclosed in a world of grief and intolerable pain, watching it from a distance like a great train rushing past me, or I could step back into it. So I stepped back into it, but it took a long time.
That was 21 years ago. But here I was thinking about that time once again, thoughts brought on no doubt by my current health predicament, a somewhat prophetic dream and the impact of a spiritual exercise involving the heart, a golden ladder, and crossing the gap in the octave. I found myself pondering on this and thinking about life continuing in our absence, potentially mine, and I suddenly understood with great clarity that life has to continue, that it cannot stop to mourn with us because it doesn’t have that luxury, nor is that its purpose. And I smiled.
I smiled because I saw how much the wild child who existed all those years ago had grown in depth and breadth, how she had expanded beyond herself, and how she had found her rhythm with life. When we die, and when those around us die, we are still part of the stream of life, and though we may be gone from the sight of others, we don’t cease to exist. And though the world may not miss us, Heaven will welcome us with open arms.
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