Carrying This Pain

  Grief journey Day 73 - that's 73 days alone after 5, 215 with Dan. So yes, I am *still* mired in pain, loneliness, loss, yearning and, to some people unfathomably - self reproach. Even as I work through that last bit, the rest is unrelenting and omnipresent. Everywhere I go in here, his ghost is with me...the chair he sat in all his life, the herbs I gave him, basically forever - the pine chest in my office that holds his toys, winter coat, bowl - the excruciatingly empty spot on the sofa beside where we slept.  He is everywhere here and it hurts me all day and night, without respite. Even when I am relatively "ok" - when a client case or a cat issue (Tatyana is now unwell) or even a good tv series has distracted me from the loss of my anam cara, I am in pain. Like the sign says....

 

 

I walk into the bathroom and he is not following me. I go to put on a ring and I remember how long I looked for that green amber ring - was it 2012? he would have been right by my side while I searched on etsy. Yesterday I read through a Druid blog I enjoy, but became obsessed with each month - what were Dan and I doing? So I wound up looking through every day of 2013, a pretty good year overall. Again, overcome with longing for the past, for the days my back was better, for our beautiful free and magical days. For him, always, always - for him.

Squinting in the Summer Solstice morning, 2013 -  I was out back in rapture. I love how clear his angel is here. And Frank couldn't actually care less about any of it.

Out by the creek, in his little Chilly Dogs coat. I remember that day so vividly, he had a blast.  February 2013


Day by day, I learn to live with this absence, with this pain....just now, I took my tea outside to sit with Zeke, who at 16 and totally paralyzed in the hind end, enjoys lying out back after a long hard winter inside. I heard a lawnmower and thought - that's the first spring lawn mower I have heard without my Dan, since 2006.

Fifteen years.

Every sound, smell, every play of light on water, every first bite of summer fruit - everything that is  "new" (eg experienced now without him beside me) is a strange, pain-saturated, disorienting experience. He was that much a part of me.

I know the gratitude will overtake the grief, someday, or so I am told; that the  endless searing pain of his absence will soften into a dull ache, and then morph into a cherished memory, a gift that lives in my heart - but it seems so far off and impossible now as I gaze up at a hawk circling the sky, as I did every spring since  that first one, so long ago - but, for the first time, alone.

And the world today, with all its pain and sorrow, hope and promise, is reduced to a single bird in an anguished blue sky, and one woman alone, her heart in a million pieces, wanting and wanting the one thing that can never be.

I love you Dan - so so much, I love you. Forever and always.... me and you, and you and me.