How do we clumsily resume writing online after losing a friend online, when that surprise loss has slapped us hard, not quite settled in, left us wondering with every visit: When is she going to post? How can it be?
I've learned what I needed to know, although meg's going doesn't sit gently with me, at the core, where there is always more I want to understand. To know. To figure out, even though doing so isn't likely to change a thing.
Somewhere in all of this I'm rolling the meaning of love around in my head, tasting its different flavors, understanding it has no single look or feel. How is that?
I talked about it some in group, processing it more than grieving it. Trying to understand the layers of this reminded me of an experience I had during my ten-day, near-death hospital stay eight years ago, when I so badly wanted to live, and so badly wanted the unrelenting panic to stop that I wanted to die, all At The Exact Same Moment. That duality, multiplicity, is maddening: when things don't make sense at all but feel so overwhelmingly powerful that feeling alone takes over your being; you are nothing but skin and nerve endings.
Understanding the multiplicity of love and pain and joy and agony and loss and celebration simultaneously, that's where acceptance comes in, I suppose. Or at least an 'okay for now.'
Sometimes that's all we can give. Or all we're given.
Tags: loss, grieving, michelle goodrich, mandarin design = Powered by Qumana
