Let the Sun Shine in...

For weeks, even months after Courtney, my younger daughter, died, I'd awaken in a darkened room and just lie there. No thoughts, words, or other stimuli pierced the blackness, just the thud of my heart's beat as I listened to my breathing.  Alive? I guess. So? On a rare morning, when I'd muster the energy from somewhere (the strength of ancestors?)  finally, to sit up and swing my legs to the floor, exhaustion enveloped me.  Just like that.  I'd sit there, shoulders hunched as if awaiting the next punch or the deluge of drenching tears.  I'd sit.

An old wall poster, framed in the office of a university president I knew, just flashed across the mirror of my mind.  A three-legged stool stood in its center of a wall.  At the very top, words declared "Sometimes I sits and thinks," at the foot, they affirmed"And sometimes I just sits."  That declaration moored my days.  Sometimes, most of the time, I just sat an hour or so.  Oftentimes, I'd alternate between foot-tapping or knuckle-cracking.  Mostly, I sat as immovable as a sphinx.

 

Stirred from lethargy by a  particularly penetrating memory, I would relive the pain over and over.  That tired me more and before I knew it, a week or two had come and gone.  Yet, the great Quincy Jones promised, "Everything must change; nothing stays the same..."  True that.  Time waits for no one or no thing. The only nexus between the movent of time over days, weeks, months, or even years, and surcease from grief and sorrow lies in the passing of it.  Time's quality is neither quantifiable nor qualifiable.

Time does not heal wounds! That's not time's intentionality.

Perhaps time might mark a movement toward healing if that.  Memorials---first, second, or fifth anniversary---or milestones---natal days, graduations, or marriage---of a cherished one's death do more to arrest the anguish than remove it.  I remember being surprised when I woke up on the first anniversary of my grandson, Philip's, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).  My mind never conceived that I could live a year without him.  I still marvel that I did.  Catatonia? Maybe.

Nothing could have prepared me for Courtney's death!  She had recovered from a lengthy hospital stay two years previously.  Admittedly,  I wouldn't, couldn't, leave her bedside.  Perhaps the long-held guilt from Philip's death: "Ii only I had let Philip sleep with me his last night on this earth plane, I could've saved him!"  propelled me to gratefully accept the Hospital-provided recliner as a more-than-adequate substitute for my queen-size bed.   It took months of therapy and the empathetic, clearly stated explanation from a physician friend of mine to disabuse me of the belief that I could've saved Philip from the most final of finalities. 

Since their deaths and those of precious and priceless family and friends--- Mother, Daddy, and siblings top the roster---I seem seated, often precariously, in the front row on the Rollercoaster of Grief and Loss, a seat I'd relinquish in a New York Minute!.