Time is a great healer ….


Driving is my safe place, a place to think, feel calm, to sing, enjoy solitude and to grieve. I wondered at times what people think when they see a woman driving, singing at the top of her voice whilst sobbing uncontrollably, thankfully those days rarely exist any more and I've reached a point where I simply don't care.

Today, driving in the gray, rainy weather, my mind wandered, randomly opening the doors of my mind and peeking in. One door, that usually remains firmly closed, swung open and my heart tested gingerly to see if it was ready for what was behind it. For the first time in 10 years and 8 months, surprisingly there was no agonising pain. Softly, gently, for the first time  I probed the question … what did Pat think and feel upon the impact of his pickup rolling over and flipping?  Did he realise the exact moment when the pickup started it's way across the road and down the embankment? The truck flipping and rolling end to end and side to side before stopping upright? Did he feel pain?

Thoughts of what I knew came to mind … Pat telling his mate to just let him out of the truck and he would be ok if he could just walk around. Not knowing that his neck was broken and walking was no longer an option. He was incredibly cognisant of date, time, place and who his wife was until consciousness waned. Was he aware of the blood streaming down his face, of his body slumped cocooned in the space between the steering wheel and seat for the hour it took to cut his body free?

What about the lifeflight? His blood spurting onto the medic's shoe as his life ebbed? Was he aware of the fight for life going on in the helicopter as it flew to the hospital?  Did he feel his brother's hands lovingly placed on his head as pleas for life, guidance of Dr's hands and gratitude for familial bonds flew heavenward?

Did he hear and recognise my voice as I whispered in his ear?

Are there answers ? Yes, just not yet, one day when my heart stops beating. Today, there is gratitude and soft, gentle joy for growth and understanding.  Has it really been 10 years and 8 months? Those numbers slip easily away, my mind confused at the conundrum of just how Long and short that time has been. I am grateful for the first door swinging wide open and know that those remaining locked doors will do the same in much less time. Yes, time is a great healer ……

Time, incomprehension and numbness.

1 year, 10 months and 26 days seems like forever. Yet, in that same space it feels like a minute ago.  And my heart and mind still can't comprehend that you are not here physically.  I can't touch you. I can't smell you. I can't hear your voice. I can't feel your kiss. And what is worse, my mind at this time doesn't recall them.  Being apart physically for 5 years before you died expedited that part of the grieving process.

 How do I marry the extremely physical pain of your death and the knowledge of hearing and feeling your spiritual self ? It doesn't make sense. I want you back but yet I know how happy and whole you are, I wouldn't want you to return to your broken body.  I just want you back, physically. To love, to hold, to kiss, to enjoy all that this beautiful world has to offer. My impatience shows all the time.  I just want to be with you.  

How did we get to this so quickly ?

Numbness has become my friend and my confusion.  There are more days, sometimes weeks, when I feel no pain, no real sorrow nor any great joy or feelings of love. Just existence. A strange shadow of myself.  Sometimes, my thoughts whirl, should I feel numb, why don't I feel that pain?  Is this "normal" ? I have no idea. I try on ideas from others who are grieving, does that fit? Maybe there is no normal...just agony, tears, and waiting.

6 years.

Typical almonds and raisins day today.  Saw a brilliant movie "Pride" with my Mum, slightly difficult time spent with her, as per normal. Whilst driving home from dropping her off, I had almost pulled up and stopped at one of those heavy intersections when the flashing lights of a fire engine caught my eye and breath in an instant.  The middle of the road bush hid the rest of the carnage from my view but I did not need to see because my heart already knew why it was there.

The jaws of life.

 6 years and one month ago, in another part of the world, those jaws of life were being employed to cut the man I love from the vehicle that cocooned his body.  I was not there,  I was not even in the same country, nor was I awake or aware of the fight that was going on.  Not for several days, until after I had returned, did I know the truth and agony of what he had been through. For the most part, that knowledge was shelved in the part of my brain that quickly became the "too agonising to think about" vault.  In those seconds/minutes when a thought surfaced, the pain whisked it away. Passing accidents, hearing of accidents, sometimes hearing sirens would set of the reaction I never had.

6 years, 1 month after his accident; 17 months after he died, whilst slowing to a stop, that vault door swung open.

I sobbed my way home.

Lost ...

For months, 16 to be exact, I've been hurtling, drowning, bobbing along in the ebb and flow of an ocean of grief.  My head knows where you are, love of my eternity,  but the very core of my physical being doesn't. My spirit rejoices that you are whole but at the same time, my cellular structure screams "where are you?".  The French do not say "I am missing you", they say "You are missing from me". I've felt that, every breath, every heart beat, every second of my life from the moment yours stopped.

How do I live ?

I am existing, but how do I live ? Living means joy, living means doing things without you, living means years ahead without you physically by my side, living means laughing without yours mingling with mine, living means letting go of our life together here on earth.  And I don't want to do that.

I know I chose this, I know we chose this together.  I know this will be a second in our eternity together but now ...  


now I'm lost.  

Love in the third degree

Life and love are never what we think they will be. What we dream they will be. When we think about loving a wife or husband it is with the ideal that they will love you and you only. That any past loves will be exactly that, a past love.

As time moves on, I am thinking more and more that this is only easy when that love has been for a short length of time. And only when there has been a finalisation and a healing. A past love that has 20 years behind it does not really become past.

I had 15 years between husbands to overcome that past love. Plenty of time to heal and move onward. I wish things had been that way for my husband. How difficult it is to be in love with a man who still loves his high school sweetheart. Throw into that mix memory loss, especially the loss of OUR memories. Our marriage does not exist in his mind as much as his first one does. It's the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of love. I hear the excitement in his voice as he recounts memories from his past love. I hear the emotion. I hear the connection that in his memory still exists between them. It hurts. It hurts to have him living between two worlds. It hurts to know I will never experience marriage the way I had believed and understood that I would.

I am thankful that that hurt is no longer as consuming as it was. I am thankful that I am able to stand back from it and try to find some answers. Answers that will bring me peace and the ability to live my life with joy. Can I stand back enough and learn to love this man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of love ? Am I strong enough to live with the past that is not really passed ?? What if this is my calling ? to be able to do this ? Can I overcome the questions that run through my mind ?? I know he does love me. Sometimes I just don't know if he loves me enough. If he had the chance later would he want to be sealed to her ? To continue that love ? He has told me so many times how consuming and how much he loved her. If only I could hear him say things like that about me and fully believe them. How do I push out the conflicting things he has told me ? I think what I really hear when he tells me how much he loves me is .. "I love you but ... "

I feel sad.

Drowning ...

an abyss of pain

I curl inwards

wave after wave

relentless

have I strength to let it be or

do I push it away

again

The First

I set this blog up last year but then discovered that I was too raw to write from my heart. Several times in the last few months, I have thought about things to write but still the time was not right. It is now ...

I belong to a website called LDS Linkup, it's basically a discussion site for frustrated LDS voices, a place where one's thoughts and ideas can be explored, most of the time in a "knock down, what are you thinking " way and occasionally, very occasionally, in a "wow, let's have a great discussion" way. This is where I saw an invitation to be a guest blogger about love. I thougth I know a little bit about love now, let's give it a go. So here it is ....

I love driving along the road with the wind in my hair, singing at the top of my voice to Foreigner's " I wanna know what love is .. " . Apart from liking the song, I love that whilst my mouth is busy singing the words, my brain is busy asking " Do I really know what love is ? "

This is a question that frequently haunts my thoughts. As a little girl, dreaming of white knights and honeymoons in Switzerland, I only thought of love as being what I needed in my childhood cocoon and, what seemed like an eternity away, that MAN who would sweep me of my feet and declare undying love for me and ME only ! . My Dad's bear hug's when the whole world was against me ( more likely my Mum telling me off ! ), a homemade biscuit when walking into an empty house after school, a book that I could lose myself in and dancing were the loves that I knew I could count on. Later, when a week after my 14th birthday, my Mother left, those sureties lessened even more and love became something that for me, was difficult. I had no problem loving others but being able to accept that I was a lovable person was a whole other ball game AND a whole other blog.

I wanna talk about love ... love between a HUSBAND and WIFE.

Except for the obligatory "falling out before they marry " , Hollywood would have us believe that LOVE, a REAL TRUE LOVE, is always GOOD. ALWAYS happy, ALWAYS shining. Nothing bad ever happens to two people who are TRULY in LOVE. Not that this is anything new, because since time began, we have heard fairytales of TRUE LOVE and HAPPY EVER AFTER from birth. In these days of " I want it and I want it NOW", if there is even a slight smudge of a thumbprint on the shininess of TRUE LOVE , it's become a case of discard that love, he or she is not the ONE.

Well, after dabbling in Hollywood fantasy and lust dressed up as "love and marriage" during my tender Twenties, and spending 20 years in contemplation of what LOVE between a man and woman should be, whilst raising my children single handedly, I thought that I was well PREPARED for my MAN to come thundering in and fly me to the Swiss Alps. I thought that I had debunked the whole mystery of being in LOVE with HIM and was just waiting for MY happy ever after to BEGIN. I knew that it takes TWO to MAKE a marriage and it takes TWO to BREAK a marriage.

I had found ME during that time and discovered that not only was I stubbornly independent (a quality that I have most generously shared with my own daughter ), intelligent, sexy and strong ( yes, I shared those too!) but I was also LOVABLE.

Drum roll, please..... dadadadaaa, and then I found HIM! Now this is no small feat considering that I was all the way around the globe living in Perth, Western Australia and he hails from Utah, USA !! We struck up a friendship in an online dating site whilst he was driving across his country in a white Peterbuilt truck and I sold fabrics in mine. As an aside, it's actually amazing just how many people the inter (or as MY man would say entire) net has actually matched into couples! We developed warm fuzzies for each other, got engaged, had the obligatory falling out, got together in the same country, said YES and committed to an ETERNITY together and then REALITY set in. HORRIBLE, HARD, HURTFUL REALITY.

Who was THIS man ?? Why, when we LOVE each other so much was it so difficult to LIVE together ? How come I never got told that LOVE hurt? That there were days when LOVE was buried under a tonne of words that harmed ?? That you can LOVE and HATE in the same minute???? That there were times when running far, far away seemed like the best solution?? ( Certainly not an easy thing to do when living in a country that has not yet become home!)

How can REAL love be so painful ? Everything that I had learned or THOUGHT I had learned about TRUE LOVE, ETERNAL LOVE vanished. Now, I told you I am stubborn, so giving up is not something that I really do well!! Immigration stepped into the fight and soon I was returning to my safe place and my children, to figure out that age old question .. what is LOVE but more importantly if this is what LOVE is, can I LIVE with it ???

Now, don't get me wrong, I am married to an amazing man. A GOOD man. WE match on so many levels. WE LOVE each other, it's just darn hard to live together.

Six weeks later, that thumbprint smudge had covered any shininess and I was ready to discard and move on. Then at 5 am on Thursday 9th October 2008, I answered the call that NO ONE ever wants to answer. Life changed in a nanosecond. In that lightning flash of horror that occurs, I KNEW that nothing mattered except LOVE. I flew home to Idaho. For the next 3 magical months, LOVE was HEAVEN. HEAVEN was LOVE. My MAN, slept deep in his coma for a few weeks and floated in sedation for a few more. LOVE was EASY for the first time. I felt him, I heard him, I knew he was there, I KNEW THAT HE LOVED ME, even as I dealt with staff telling me to think about THAT choice, QUALITY VERSUS QUANTITY of life. As his broken body and brain started to come together into some semblance of the man I said YES to, his ICU room became OUR HEAVEN. When he learnt to speak again just before Christmas that year, HIS first words were " I know I love you and I know we are married I just don't remember your name." There will never be ANYTHING he can utter that will ever be as sweet and magical as those words.

January 3rd 2009, our HEAVEN vapourised as a plane swiftly returned me to the land Down Under and REALITY and our PAST returned with vigour. Along with the added bonus of dealing with the changes that Quadriplegia and memory loss bring to our LIFE here on Earth. In the last two years, those kilometres/miles have afforded US the chance to sift through baggage and FIND the FOREVER US.

LOVE, a REAL TRUE LOVE is not just a feeling. It's a COMMITMENT and a CHOICE. Everyday we CHOOSE to LOVE and we CHOOSE to COMMIT. Some days are better than others. Some days are so BRIGHT and SHINY that WE can see FOREVER.

The only thing my white knight rides now is an electric wheelchair and I still haven't had a honeymoon but do I know what LOVE is ??? OH, YEH.