“Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love even more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant. Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.”
“And then I slept, and the sleep is always good. But I woke slow, wondering why I should. I try to place myself, who and when and why. I’m drawing blanks, all I know is I’m goddamn tired….
I whittle at days without any shape in mind, and then I’m bummed looking back at the shavings piled. It’s a wonder I manage to breathe. Would I live if it was all left up to me? I don’t know, but it kind of seems these days I’m just alive because my body babysits me.”
“Sweet little Susie Sue, how could you be so rude? I don’t even want to talk to you. You can go to hell. But if I was the violent type, I’d turn you into coffee grinds, I’d brew you in that french press we use, and then I’d drink your soul. If I was the violent type, I’d end your life with a telephone wire, I’d leave it there to catch on fire, and then I’d smoke your ashes.”
Years later I read a quote by Stephen King that summed up what it was like living with the abuse: “People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, ‘How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn’t you see the elephant in the living room?’ And it’s so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; ‘I’m sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn’t know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture.’”
For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?
How often — will it be for always? — how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, “I never realized my loss till this moment”? The same leg is cut off time after time.
“I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.”
