Living In Between Seconds

This second of time, the one that we’re both aware of because I’m mentioning it, becomes the next second of time (or the second second, if you’re keeping track, and I’m not going to distract you with pondering why the first second isn’t called “first,” because doesn’t “second” mean that something came before it?).

            Anyway, this second of time has already moved into the past, and I’m still thinking about it. When my wife died, I did the same thing for like 63 million seconds. She was breathing and smiling one second, and not the next. Her life ended and everything she was became the past. 

            After staring in the rearview mirror for two years looking at her life, looking at our life together, looking at all our dreams that had been yanked out at the roots, I reached a place where a second of time existed on its own again. It hovered as a free creature neither tied to the past nor looking ahead to the future. It just existed on its own, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

            My second became more seconds, then a minute, an hour, and they all kept piling up and moving forward on their own, and I couldn’t stop or even slow them down when I remembered something about Evelyn and wanted to reflect on it. Some of you, maybe most of you, are thinking, “Well, yah. We’re always moving forward a second at a time. We don’t have any control over the movement of time.” 

            But grief does. Grief controls time with a wrench, and when we’re grieving, grief cranks time off like a pipe and it stops moving. Grief rearranges the universe so that we can exist in any moment in the past and be with our loved ones in a quasi state of being. 

            In this second of freedom, although we don’t HAVE to think about the past, we still do. And as we try to move forward, we drag our dead with us. It’s like a package deal on a cruise ship that goes from Spain to Italy to Greece but also to the Maldives.

            I liked the life I had and my battered heart hadn’t figured out what it wants to do now.

            We know in our hearts, or guts, or wherever we go to discern what we’re feeling, that grief will always be part of our life because we will always love the one who died. We will always feel the sorrow and pain in some permutation, but we hope that beauty, joy, laughter and dancing will return and be part of the mix.

            Life after a death is not either/or. It is both/and.

            While grief will stop directing our traffic, it will remind us, now and then, that we, and any of our loved ones, can die at any time from a variety of causes, most of which we can’t prevent.

            Which brings me back to our original second. Grief taught me the importance of living this second fully, of paying attention to what is happening now, what I am feeling now, and how I can interact with the people around me now and make a difference in their lives. 

            We have this second to do something amazing. Anything beyond that is grace.

Related Link

Grief At a Party http://widowersgrief.blogspot.com/2010/09/at-party.html