If you have ever lost someone you truly loved, no matter how many years pass by the loss remains a bitter ache. I have never entirely found peace about my loss and in my heart there has always been a little bit of war still waging all these years later. Grief is a haunting. You count days, then months, then years. You count birthdays and anniversaries but you agonize a little less with each passing event. Just a little, mind you. My loved one is a ghost that haunts me still, manifesting himself in the form of crushing despair-- less a poetic melancholy and more like the grim aftermath of a brutal beating and I'm still amazed to have survived. I still miss him, all these decades later, and it still hurts sometimes like it happened yesterday. He remains forever young as I continue to age; he will always be thirty. A great deal of who I am stayed back there, with him, in 1986. Now, later in life I can conclude an inevitable sense of failure, an overwhelming gloom in the knowledge that days, months and years, f ew that we had--are done and gone forever. But back then I simply exulted in the false but glorious knowldge that life would be exactly that way from thereon. I wasn't different from anybody else in that sense. I took youth, and the gifts I had as a special pact from God. Endings were not endings. Even now, in middle age, he recurs..like a fragrance. Have you ever pushed your nose into a fresh blossom and breathed deeply of the heavenly scent inside? My precious memories of that time with him are like that, only the flower of memory is withering and dry like the skin on the back of my hand. The scent is faded, different-- but it's still there and the blossom of those memories are pressed like a prom-corsage between the pages of my mind.
A piece of me has been lost and will never be recovered. It went away with him so long ago. It is something (not just someone) fatal piercing my life forever. I've learned to never squander those moments in the life I have now. I value them like collectors and their rare coins, only more. Much more. Coins are just that, coins. My life before is broken fragments and the memories are all I have; more precious than the oldest, rarest coin. Unlike a drop of blood in a bowl of milk they are still more persistent, like a stone thrown into a water as still and calm as a mirror.
What I've learned: Let yourself be happy and content, in case that what you have is all you will ever have. Don't lose what is precious to you in ingnorance and delusion. And anger is a poison and it will rise from you like smoke from a fire if you let it. Don't covet something else when what you have is all you need. I have chosen to walk further into the life given to me instead of staying paralized by my sadness and grief. What I lost has been given back to me, in another form and wrapped in a different parcel but even more precious than I could have ever dreamed possible. When you chose to go on, walk a new path-- even when you believe your life destroyed, and take steps of faith forward to the unknown and unchartered. You will find new-found pleasures you never knew could exist; The fragile dogwood, sumac and redbud that wither after the first frost, grim as death--soon push forward with new growth and vibrant color, inviting a new beginning. The stars will be sprayed once again across the indigo sky and the dew will glisten again on the apple-green grass.
If you were to die tomorrow, don't spend your last day cursing God but praise nature and the wonderous creation He gave us to set our eyes upon every day. When all you've loved and lost is seemingly gone forever, let what you held in your hand for a short while become sweeter in the mind; do not let go but hold on even tighter. Take your losses as no more than flesh wounds and walk on. Love what is left like there is no tomororrow. Yes, loss is damn painful but how can we experience joy if not given the purest moments of love, peace and serenity?
Grief still haunts me and will haunt me until I die but I have been given much more than I've lost and I chose to plant new seeds and watch them grow and when I'm gone the flowers of those seeds will leave their scent for others after me.
A piece of me has been lost and will never be recovered. It went away with him so long ago. It is something (not just someone) fatal piercing my life forever. I've learned to never squander those moments in the life I have now. I value them like collectors and their rare coins, only more. Much more. Coins are just that, coins. My life before is broken fragments and the memories are all I have; more precious than the oldest, rarest coin. Unlike a drop of blood in a bowl of milk they are still more persistent, like a stone thrown into a water as still and calm as a mirror.
What I've learned: Let yourself be happy and content, in case that what you have is all you will ever have. Don't lose what is precious to you in ingnorance and delusion. And anger is a poison and it will rise from you like smoke from a fire if you let it. Don't covet something else when what you have is all you need. I have chosen to walk further into the life given to me instead of staying paralized by my sadness and grief. What I lost has been given back to me, in another form and wrapped in a different parcel but even more precious than I could have ever dreamed possible. When you chose to go on, walk a new path-- even when you believe your life destroyed, and take steps of faith forward to the unknown and unchartered. You will find new-found pleasures you never knew could exist; The fragile dogwood, sumac and redbud that wither after the first frost, grim as death--soon push forward with new growth and vibrant color, inviting a new beginning. The stars will be sprayed once again across the indigo sky and the dew will glisten again on the apple-green grass.
If you were to die tomorrow, don't spend your last day cursing God but praise nature and the wonderous creation He gave us to set our eyes upon every day. When all you've loved and lost is seemingly gone forever, let what you held in your hand for a short while become sweeter in the mind; do not let go but hold on even tighter. Take your losses as no more than flesh wounds and walk on. Love what is left like there is no tomororrow. Yes, loss is damn painful but how can we experience joy if not given the purest moments of love, peace and serenity?
Grief still haunts me and will haunt me until I die but I have been given much more than I've lost and I chose to plant new seeds and watch them grow and when I'm gone the flowers of those seeds will leave their scent for others after me.
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