No Way Back To Eden

It has been a year since Lorena, my love, my partner, my hopes and my dreams, died. It seems like yesterday and an eternity.

I have grieved. My sadness, punctuated by hopelessness and anger, has been unrelenting.

Friends ask whether anything has changed in the year since leukemia ended her life and our future together.

Nothing really, except that I have gotten used to being alone, really alone. I cry daily, often in public, and am no longer ashamed. Tears and regrets have become somehow normal, another example of man’s inexorable ability to habituate to any circumstance, no matter how wonderful or terrible it may be.

I spend most of my time at home, the one I bought to live in with Lorena for the rest of our lives, a home filled with photographs, shadow boxes, her things, our memories.

She is my first thought every morning and my last thought every night.

I do not will my circumstance, but accept it without self-pity.

It is simply the way it is.

A wise friend, who also happens to be an accomplished psychologist, offered me the most useful observation of the many that I have received. He said, “An appropriate process for a grieving person is not to ‘forget,’ or to ‘move on’ – for that would be a sin. It would dishonor the gift of love given by the person who has passed on. And your goal should not be to ‘seek resolution’ of your grief – for that, too, is not possible. You will never get over the loss, Jim, but with the progression of time, the painful feelings gradually become softer and rounder, a bit easier to carry.”

“What is possible,” he told me, “is a meditation on what Lorena would want for you – now and in the future. And, if you choose to include that meditation in your grieving process, please go slowly and expect any changes or insights to happen gradually.”

And that is exactly what I intend to do on the anniversary of Lorena’s death. I will spend the day at home, not alone, but with Lorena, and we will talk gently and sweetly about our wonderful times together, and what she wants for me in the days I have left here.

There is no way back to Eden, but perhaps there is a path leading elsewhere, one that I need to walk to fulfill whatever it is I am supposed to accomplish or experience.

Subscribe here