Deaths which are sudden and unexpected come as a shock and our entire reality is reordered in the face of them. Today as I slowly woke I adjusted to the reality of the last week, the sudden loss of my friend, the world is changed without her and it brings to mind other times of loss, first the loss of my father at 22 and them my sister and my Mum. I look back to the death of my father and see I never fully integrated it at the time, just too much was going down and I was very young. For my sister there was no way of knowing she would rapidly deteriorate although I was visiting her over years in the home and she was slowly slipping into another world at times with all the drugs they were giving her. With my mother that death followed on an awful week where my young grand niece suffered a seizure after visiting us for five days with her Dad, my dead sister’s third son who endured a lot of abandonment trauma when Jude was returned to us with a one way ticket when she was damaged from the aneurysm. Mum fell in the following week and was hospitalised and I got to spend time with her by her side saying all the things I needed to say, unlike with my father and my friend, Christine. With Jude she was unconscious but I had a whole night sitting holding her hand in the time before we had to make the decision to take her off life support.
Each death I could adjust more to in later years and I finally found my way back to my tears from about 1999 onwards as I began to put down substances by my family did not understand that journey I was on, to their mind and my then husband’s mind I needed to be ‘getting on with life’, not withdrawing from life and work and the outside world to do my inner soul work.
I am glad now that I chose to go that way. Yes, I ended up in isolation at the coast and that took me back to the time after my accident in 1979 and to the death of my Dad since we got to enjoy 6 summers there before he was taken from us. But it was very dark time and I tried to launch back onto the path I was on just before my husband left to go back to the UK do more therapy and continue my psychological astrology course, but sadly I had the second accident and that forced me to come home again which I now know was the right choice.
I look back to how much I have beaten myself up in my life and shamed myself for things that were so far out of my control and it makes me cry a lot but they are good tears as they are tears of recognition and healing. Recognising painful truths hurts, but to my mind its far better than living in denial. And also its part of growing up and realising the the child within forms mistaken perceptions so often of things. I know now all of those unrequited childhood longings that drove me towards relationships and see the only option I had was to take on the role of ‘fucked up damaged one’, it went along with my addiction and what Sylvia Bretton Perrera calls being ‘a scapegoat identified’ individual. I was not fucked up. I was not suffering from demons I just had a hell of a lot of unintegrated pain, sorrow and confusion as well as very poorly defined ego boundaries.
We sensitives and intuitives are often wired differently to a lot of our families and we see and feel and hear and know things they would rather we don’t. We come to believe we are flawed in some way but if we can just trust our hearts in time they lead us home. Often we never got the parental recognition and those of us who were neglected attuned to the inner life and world of nature and that is how we survived until we could find our way back to our true inner knowing.
My connection with my friend Christine who died last week was very special like this as she never scapegoated me and she saw my dilemma in my family, she recognised how close by I stayed with my loving heart hoping for so much more from them than they could ever give. I will miss her so much for the chats we had and for her great sense of humour and how she saw also into the heart of things as another empath. I feel though very grateful that I have now reached the stage where I do not feel my sadness eclipses everything. I can recognise the imperfection in life and how random it is at times and yet how full of meaning and purpose and lessons too. Most of all I am grateful to a loving force of life that bought us into each other’s lives if only for a short while. I take it all as a gift.
I had a good outing with my sister yesterday too. We just went for afternoon tea at the place we used to make my older sister when she lived in the care home. We spoke of a lot of things and she was sharing with me her memories of our step Grandad who died when I was only 1. It make me recognise that in my family each siblings experience is different, most especially in ours where there were huge age gaps between us all. My older sis who died was more like a young mother to me, I adored her and got caught up in all of her trauma, I see that now. She was the one encouraging me to drink alcohol in my early teens which was not a good thing really, but I loved her rebel spirit and think at times that is what has most kept me alive and it finally got me sober at 31,
In many ways the death of my sister and mother were releases and with them an entire phase of my life drew to a close. I realise in the wake of my mother’s death I have had to start to learn to mother myself better, Dads death at 22 left me alone and foundering in many ways on the back of him not fully supporting my true self, but I forgive it all now. It is just the legacy I got to carry being born to that particular set of parents during the 1960s who were both survivors of depression and war. No one did anything ‘wrong’ it was all just life unfolding. Its been a hell of a lot to understand and recognise of legacies bequeathed.
And life is far from over which is what my friends death really reminds me of. Death reminds me to live my life with as much gratitude as I can and to make the most of each and every single day, it reminds me that its okay to feel sad for a while and to use that sadness to open my heart and cherish my remaining relationships. I don’t fear my sadness quite a much any more. I see its a huge challenge to grieve well in our culture which often represses grief and sadness, that said we can linger too long in sadness too, I can see that now. I see how it used to frustrate my last partner but I also see how he feared his own feelings which is why he so often shamed me for mine, in the end I had to find a therapist to validate my journey because so many of my other relationships have not been validating. As a recovering addict who was unparented in many ways I blamed myself for things that were not my fault, that said I am responsible for the quality of my life and attitudes in the aftermath Today I know I am an innocent child of God, I also know that at times I can have a dark side, I can lash out when I am angry but I know also that in many ways I also was not really ever allowed to have that valid anger along with healthy self assertive boundaries. In short I was not allowed to know I had value and had a right to fight to be loved or at least love myself and know my true inner value. I now know my inner value and I am grateful that I do. I know I am not perfect at all, I only know I was lost and trying so hard to find my way home, the loveliest thing now is that so often I DO feel at home, deep within my own skin, the truest realest place of belonging that nothing outside of me can buy. That feeling honestly fills me with so much love, not only for the good times but for every single painful experience that has brought me ‘home’.
Emerging From The Dark Night 