Sara, you were my compass. Our love was my north star. You were everything I’d wanted in a life partner and filling our life with love was my goal. Now that you’re gone, my compass needs to be recalibrated and I’m still trying to figure out what that means and how to do it.
I still want love to be the foundation of my life, but love is different now. Choosing to love is so explicitly now also choosing to be vulnerable to more pain, more loss. Love and sorrow are inseparable. With every beat of my heart I can feel both pulse through my body. In reality being open to love has always meant being open to loss, but now that I have experienced that worst-case-scenario loss (twice), I cannot ignore or deny the connection between love and vulnerability, between love and the possibility of sorrow.
Despite the now so-clear connection between love and pain, I know that I need to try to do what I can to re-root my life in love. My life was uprooted, and the past year has been focused on damage control. At some point I’m going to have to shift that focus to re-planting and figuring out how to encourage my roots to go deeper and become stronger – try to regain some of the security I lost. (Though, to some extent security is just an illusion.)
There are so many ways love can exist in our lives – friendship, self-care, community, nature, spirituality, parenthood, romance, learning, other family relationships, pets, creativity… I know we’re coming up on a year since your death, but I just – I can’t think about romance right now. Although I miss that, so much, I miss that with YOU and I’m just not ready to consider that type of love yet. So for now, I have to focus on how I can fill my life with other types of love.
You were my compass, Sara. Our love was my north star. And now, I have to recalibrate.