This week’s prompt has me revisiting something that I wrote about from a different angle earlier this year. In February I wrote about a wish I had for all of us who find ourselves in this darkness of forced change and trauma. I still find that I relate to the process by which a caterpillar literally liquefies, turning into goo, and reforms as a butterfly.
While I don’t believe I’m in some magical cocoon state from which I’ll emerge a new and improved person, I do believe that this incredibly messy grief is actively transforming me. I find myself in a strange time, a time that feels suspended – a type of waiting while I process the new reality I am living in. Days are passing but I frequently time travel – back to the past when Sara and I were together and happy, or to the future that was supposed to be (also together and happy). Some days I travel back to my experience bearing witness to Sara’s last few days on this Earth, or to my experience birthing George out of this life. I also travel to my actual future, trying to visualize what the next 40 or so year without Sara will be like. I am living in the present, functioning, but there’s always a part of me doing this other work, the work of grief.
Don’t worry – I don’t spend all (or really any) of my time avoiding my present reality. This time traveling I’m doing is helping me rebuild my neural network within the context of my new reality. What does it mean to be alive without Sara or George? What about them do I want to carry forward with me? What about our time together was sacred? How did they shape me? What does it mean to sit here with my grief, day in and day out? Who am I, now that my life has turned upside down?
I am that liquefied caterpillar, waiting, becoming. This isn’t something that we can rush. Rushing this will only have tragic consequences for the me that is reforming. Despite my pain I want to live and the only way to do that is by incorporating my grief into my being, by allowing it to take root so that I can shape it and mold it. I will scar from last year’s trauma as the wounds start to close up, but if I work with my grief we can make sure that I can still function.
I do want to be clear about one thing before I go – I did not NEED this experience to transform myself or my life. I would’ve much preferred the life we had planned, and I have no doubt that growing old with Sara and George in my life would have given me ample opportunities to fully experience life and to grow as a human. But that future we had planned was taken from us – there’s no way to get it back. I hate it, but it is what happened, and I am just doing what I have to do to keep going.