Star dust and grief

I am crying for someone I've never met, that I have never known truly, someone known by everyone, and still feel crushed and lost and hurt and angry like I knew them.  It doesn't mean I've lost touch with reality or that I do not care in general for the suffering of the unnamed or that I love in a way that is unrealistic and fantastic.  Sometimes we are just forced to confront our feelings of fear and loss in an immediate and direct way.  Sometimes watching a supernova burn out reminds us that we are just hurtling through space on a rock warmed by the sun.  Sometimes the comet that we tied our hearts to is disintegrating into the blackness  and it stops our breath. 

My house is eerily quiet, missing someone who was never there.  The girls are asleep, snuggled up together across the hall from me.  The night light plugged in for the seven year old, is slowly changing colors and throwing candy shadows against the wall.  She'll be in my bed soon.  I hear myself breathing.  Not a good strong breath.  I can't fill my lungs and exhale through my nose because only these shallow, choppy breaths keep me from bursting into tears again.  I can feel my heart beating deeply in my chest.  I cannot stop that.  I listen to it and begin to count.  The counting takes my mind away from the loss.  It gives me something to do so that my idle mind does not visit what's missing.  I've cried for every one of them, have been struck to the core.

News of the passing of someone that inspired me or showed me myself before I'd even considered myself sucked the air from my lungs and stilled everything.  It seemed to never stop. My heart would go deep into my chest and my chest to my knees. Before I could stop them, there would be tears.  I'd feel the planet's atmospheric pressure change.  I'd know it to be true that they were gone and I'd sit. Sit with the silence and the truth of the inevitable.  I'd go to the tape or the film or the music or the words or the pictures and will their presence on this earth just a little longer.  I'd recall a time, a place, a moment, a gesture.  I'd hear the first note and feel my teenaged, awkward self rise from the couch in awe and disbelief. 

I'd remember the first time.  I'd remember myself from that moment, from that time.  I'd feel the layers of myself, the ones at the bottom, the ones that built me, and I'd remember the voice or the music or the sound or the image.  I'd sit in the darkness.  I'd trace my racing thoughts through my brain.  I'd feel loss.  I'd mourn.  I'd grieve.  I'd miss them, desperately miss them, their presence, their shared place on this earth and I'd reach out to others who shared the same sense of loss and longing.  We'd ask why. We'd wonder if anything could have been done. Could anything have saved them?  Can anything save us?

I'm in my bed with just one light on.  There is a saved side but I know that only my littlest will share the bed with me tonight.  Eventually.  The rest of the room is dark and still and I am alone.  I cannot bear to watch TV or videos.  Cannot bear to listen to the news.  With each retelling of a life in past tense, I shrink smaller in my own in the present.  We are living apart essentially no matter that I have saved a place for him here at his insistence.  It hurts.  This loss.  This missing what I never had, what I never knew because he remained aloof and untouchable all this time.   All my promises to live fuller, to follow my own path, to walk through darkness, to trailblaze are whispers in the face of this overwhelming malaise.  I am in shock, scared, and startlingly aware of my own presence.  I feel myself watching me and wondering what I intend to do with my life.  I listen to my shallow breathing and wonder if I intend to pour the fullness of me into my children because I don't dare live the life I promised myself I'd try to seek, but insist they try to reach.  I wonder if I even have it in me to dream anymore.  I rub my eyes.  Stardust.  In my eyes.

This last time the girls catch me, see my face in the rear view mirror as I adjust it to back out.  "Are you crying, Mommy?"  And I am.  I'd let myself believe that the fates would spare these people.  Might spare us this grief.  That they would not all be taken.  I joked with others about the Rapture and end days and then in the silence asked aloud if there was something I was missing.  It's like standing in the middle of the storm, at its eye where it seems calm, yet all around there is madness.  And I am both the calm and the madness.  There are so many tears that I tell the girls that the stardust swirling in the air has gotten into my eyes.  I am aching to my core because everything I thought I knew is no more.  With each passing, a part of my foundation crumbles.  As my girls witness me crack and glue myself together.  They attend my Spotify listening parties and watch YouTube videos.  They hold hands with me while I read to them thinking of my youthful heroes fading.  It is the three of us.  They have no choice but to allow me my space to heal.

As a girl, I'd fixed myself to the stars even though I knew that if I could see them, they'd probably already burned out.  I saw them in the sky twinkling, sparkling, showing me infinite possibility and waited for them, longed for them in that weightless forever.  I was transported.  So many who have passed this year were those stars for me.  They gave me voice, spoke my pain and heartache, longing and desire, wit and humor.  They were everywhere, some so much that I assumed I'd have them longer than they'd been promised to the world.  After first denying that they were gone, my heart settled on the realization, on the truth, and the tears could not stop.  A short, shallow breath can hold in the despair only so long and then you are whimpering on your knees.

And I am here again.  Another loss.  They came so fast this year that I could hardly catch my breath before the heartache came again.  And yet, I almost welcomed the distraction.  I am already grieving.  Each day a new assault on my heart.  Each day a crack to be reglued.  I keep holding up the stars for my girls, offering them magic to believe in.  I have tried to show them the very best of these people, the very best they've given.  They are already supernovas, hardly seen as human in our eyes.  Beyond.  Magic.  Heroic but also human.  We all need our heroes.  Theirs is their father.  And when I met him, he was sprinkled in stardust.  By the time I was looking directly at him, he was already gone.  I knew it.  But I couldn't believe it.  The giant universe that shared with us all these wonderful people now seems oppressive and scary and cold.  But I keep holding up the stars for my children though I mourn the loss of the magic and the stardust.

I cannot name them all, but they each left this world and exploded like supernovas into another without warning.   The sense of being left behind by their meteor trail of magic, unable to catch the tail of that comet, triggered me in so many ways.  Before I could get my bearings, it would happen again.  And when he finally comes home, I'll have no choice but to look into that trail of stardust and confront the sadness.


(c) Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Conscious Uncoupling: The Season of Divorce

Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin have just announced that after nearly eleven years of wedded bliss, they were "consciously uncoupling."  For many people, the terminology was confounding and for many others, ridiculous.  For me too, and I love all that esoteric, spiritual, evolutionary stuff.  But separating, divorcing, especially with children in the mix is such a painful undertaking, this from someone who has only had breakups with boyfriends, that a perfectly civilized, seemingly emotionally neutral experience where two beautiful people express thanks for the wonderful life shared and kiss and go on their way acknowledging with gratitude and loving praise sounds awesome.

I think these two were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.  Had the split been acrimonious and venomous involving cheating or abuse, there would have been chatter too.  Because she often puts her properly pedicured foot in her oil-pulled, mint-chewing, Goopy mouth by talking about how the little people live (having, of course, no idea how we live), trying to stay spiritually bonded and physically untangle from her hubby, she is a yellow circle on the middle of the target in a crowd full of Katniss sharp shooters.  I get it.  She says stupid shit, really disconnected crap that makes her look like a real spoiled ass and seems like she thinks she is above us all and yet I am still sympathetic.  I don't say so to try to convince others to feel as I do.  That's not my point.  Often, when I have hurt, been blinded by the direction of my life and my responsibility to it, I have lied to myself, convinced myself that my own perspective is right, that no one else has lived my experience, that no one else understands.  I have tried to present painful experiences as better than they really are, have run from the quiet moments when I am left alone with myself and my reality.  I have explained to anyone who will listen that no one has ever had it as bad as I, no one has every endured the way that I have, that the suffering is too much, if only people would understand.  And then I come back to reality.

Gwyneth Paltrow is such an easy target because she appears to have everything, because she preaches an understanding of our interconnectedness, of an exalted human transcendence, and then completely misses the mark about how others live, because the reality she comes back to does not give her authority to speak to "everyone else."  She's a human being.  An incredibly spoiled, pampered woman, but a human being all the same.  I forgive her her stupid remarks and complete disconnect from what the rest of us call reality because she believes strongly in her reality, is so committed to it that she cannot see the forest for the trees.  She is going through a divorce, no matter what she calls it and that shit hurts.  A part of me believes that she feels some sense of shame and failure around it, hurt and embarrassment, what many feel when they cannot save their relationships, and is trying to reframe it for herself.  We are all just going along for the ride because she is a public figure.  It really is a moment for privacy.

This past year I have seen a number of couples split or come close.  I witnessed the hideous and contentious divorce of my husband that dragged on even as our relationship was forming.  When you dig in with someone, plant seeds and set down roots, pulling up the flowers rather than seeing them bloom, can be disappointing and disorienting and traumatic.  When forced to change the life your children have come to know and to expect, in which they have found comfort, joy, and consistency, one must find strength and courage and see hope at the end of that journey.  Selling the house, new, separate homes, new rooms for the kids, starting over.  Starting OVER.  Conscious uncoupling sounds like a more suitable way to untangle than split, separate, or divorce, and the concept, though new to me until this week, does have its appeal.

Coupling, taking chances and risks, raising children, dealing with the day to day of that can wear down partnerships and change their shape.  What was once romantic and energetic can seem mundane, tired, even painful.  Most of us assume that this is the natural pattern of relationships.  Perhaps it is, but perhaps there is some truth in a relationship running the full course, that it becomes platonic, comfortable, or stagnant.  Perhaps it makes sense for a partnership to change shape or form. And maybe you are supposed to stay in it for the long haul and ride the ebb and flow, peaks and valleys that all long-term relationships present.  I don't have the answers, none at all.  But I imagine the experience of divorce, separating, consciously uncoupling, just like slogging through the wicked bad times to get to the other side is a personal choice.  One we can only hope to live privately with some level of dignity, respect, and compassion. 

Long ago when I was still searching for love and was completely unable to believe that it would ever happen for me, I would go on dates, meet men through friends or even just walking on the street and after many dates, I would talk to a friend who'd remind me when another "date" failed to make an impression, another connection failed, that "this person was someone else's, had another journey to make."  I took comfort in that.  Found solace in other destinies, possibilities.  Maybe in conscious uncoupling, letting go with gratitude and kindness, walking a new path will be less littered with hurt, pain, and fear.  Maybe.  I hope so.

(c) Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.