This grief....
..............this 'wringing out of my heart'
This has been the hardest work I have ever done. I have grieved friends and parents and my dear niece, gone too soon in a freak accident on the highway. Each has weighed on my heart and my mind in their own way.
But David...
....after all...we were almost 30 years together. We were Soulmates. He said his Heart knew me before he ever knew my name.
I talked to our friend Kalani Souza in Hawaii that night after he sighed out of his body beside me in the car.....and many times after. As I wailed my agony to him, my missing and my fears of where David had slipped away to...he said..."The missing stops when you let him go."
That gave me even more agony.
"Let him go?!" How could I do that!!!????!!!
That would have felt like abandoning all that he was....you know....just open your hand and let it go....some new age bullshit that promises to make you joyful and happy and carefree.
Like a "Jack Handy" quote about dropping your keys in lava....man...just let them go...cause they are gone!!
Later in June I contacted Richard Moss, an old mentor of mine. I was seeking a way to make sense of my loss and once again speak to the depth of our relationship, how I felt and how I wanted to 'let him go' even though I felt that he had abandoned me by dying before me (our agreement was that I was to go first!). That I didn't want to keep him here, trapped by my longing and love when his spirit might need to leave. Richard reminded me that David is beyond and in an ever higher vibrating realm and that rather than begging David not to abandon me...that I work to let him go little by little with a mantra of "I will not leave you! I will not leave myself."
Hard work
....and both he and Kalani advising me to 'let go' of David
I don't know what that looks like for sure.....letting go
...I catch glimpses here and there and a deep sense of disloyalty and betrayal is waiting there staring at me with eyes like bottomless pools.
(Is is possible to be disloyal to the Dead?)
Nonetheless, I have endeavored in little ways to let go.
Rituals
Taking ashes to Laupahoehoe for a day of ceremony and releasing him into the ocean.
He was always "my lover from the sea" and I thought of him as a dolphin
Letting go of shoes and coats and some other 'things' (though there are many still to go)
I'll be heading back there to read his name off a list of those who died and were brought to the Point there on the Hamakua Coast to be returned to Na Wahine O Ke Kai (The Woman Who Is The Sea).
I am considering a ceremony for the one year anniversary...which is closer than I would like to imagine.....
....though there has been tremendous support...I sometimes marvel at how I have survived the past nine months.
But then...
With all that fretting and pain and planning and floundering....
....little spontaneous rituals pop up
I was once again in the bathtub....(For those who do not know... I have found the bathtub to be a great calming place and spent hours there.)
I am a spontaneous vocalist....meaning that I sing what comes from me...melody and often language that is completely created in the moment...and gone when it is gone. Think Bobby McFerrin and Rhiannon....improvised song.
So there I lay....and I began singing....it feels good to vibrate the sound into the water and into my body.
A song began to form....plaintive and mournful. The language sliding lightly over the melody and repeating in places.....and I began to sense that the song was one to David.
This was a song of my love
....and my pain
.....and my letting go
.....and my sending him with love that cannot die to his new life
.....and I did not cry
A friend of ours was helping me with bodywork last weekend
More ritual that is the requirement of me maintaining the body that I still inhabit, without David
She worked in a profound and skillful way
And I sobbed into her arms as she held me and told me that I didn't have to let go of him all at once...and I sobbed deeper
The next day she said: "This morning I had an image of Dave like a boomerang. You were giving him a big throw and watching as “he” flew back to you."
Maybe I don't need to worry about him being somehow held here by my longing and love
Maybe the little rituals that evolve are the more important ones
The ones that truly set us both free and can still hold love....some essence 'flying back' to each other...through all the lifetimes together.
Don't know for sure
It will do for now though.