Lake Ontario
The clock continued to count down the minutes until dawn and I became somewhat irritated by the fact that the darkness was giving way to the light of day. A day, as it turned out, that would be cloudy and windy. The sun hidden behind clouds.
In the middle of the night somewhere a fragment of an e-mail I had written last July came to haunt me.
… as I now see it, the simple answer to the question of what would happen if I were not “special” would be that I would cease to exist. (Ok, so not so simple, really) Not only my self, but more importantly, my Self. To put this into words may seem overly dramatic, but to me it is very real. Now, I know this doesn’t mean I think I would disappear off of the face of the earth, but it does fit in with the suicidal ideation that would arise.
As the minutes continued to move through the darkness, I came to a point of being faced with the fact that my current reality is that I feel as if my connection to Self has, indeed, ceased to exist. I very purposefully use the word “feel” here, and not “think”. I can rationalize away all the reasons why this feeling carries no truth. But it is still how I feel.
At the root of this feeling is Connie’s death. I know that she held a special place for me in her heart — in fact, at her memorial one of her friends made a point to tell me that toward the end she was only seeing a few clients who were “special” to her. Does this “specialness” die with the death of her physical being? She was the one person who so steadfastly held the mirror for me in which I was able to connect with my Self and with whom I experienced a twinship that also revealed Self. And again, as much as I may be able to rationalize the ways in which she may still hold this mirror and be “twin” for me, I just do not have a felt sense that it is so. This “felt sense” is not something that I can will into being. It is either there, or not.
As this understanding was gathering form from the essence of the darkness of the early morning hours, I felt at the center of my being the old, familiar, dark void. A void in which I float without direction or purpose. My first impulse is to find a way to escape from this dark place. But if there is anything I have learned in my work with Connie it is to “Just be” and to “Stay with it.” These two admonitions had become her repeated answers in times when I was struggling and would ask what I should do or what could I read in order to deal with whatever was before me.
I remember that in the days just after her death, I was able to articulate that I did not know how to “hold” this experience. Our society does not help us deal with the reality of death. Does not prepare us for its inevitability. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Our society does everything it can to make us believe that death is something we must avoid at all costs and when it finally does find us, it is as if we have somehow failed.
So I am realizing that the sleepless wanderings of my thoughts have brought me to the understanding that I am in the midst of learning how to authentically hold this experience in its fullness. Perhaps once I have adequately learned how to do this, and I do mean “adequately” and not “mastered”, I will once again have a felt sense of connection with Self.
Journey of My Soul.... 