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Posts tagged ‘Healing the wound’

Sep 2

Three Minutes

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The summers come and pass into falls; the ground hardens, and winter calls the earth into its slumber. Awake, and come forth out of the ground, sweet spring! The cycle continues. And so it goes with grief. We spiral through the cycles of the years. With time, the tears change in quality and quantity, until one day, when we least expect it, we notice ourselves standing on new shores and feeling new emotions.

The longer I move forward, and as the years fade one to another, I realize that if I’m doing this well enough, I’ll find myself challenged in new ways. At the beginning I thought the process of grief was to arrive on the new shore and celebrate something. The something to be celebrated never came. What I came to understand was that doing grief well enough is not for wimps.

The further out I move from what happened eight years ago, the more I find myself in the forest of uncertainty. That place where the monsters of exploration and uncertainty dwell. In a strange and surprising way, this summer gifted me with sanctuary. I wasn’t expecting any of what has happened in my grief journey this summer.

Three minutes of my life have affected me for eight years. In July of 2023, a sequence of events began to unfold in my life that set me in motion towards resolving three minutes of a conversation that had scared and wounded me in a way I’d never been hurt before. I’m healing from his suicide in a way I could not have imagined a year ago.

I tell people that there is grief, and that all grief is difficult, and some of it is filled with unexpected trauma because life is not predictable in any way. We may not see a death coming. We don’t see a person who exits life by suicide coming. They’ve done the unthinkable. They thought of it and carried a plan out. We’re left with a puzzle. Why?

If they left a note, it explains their thinking, or sometimes the lack thereof. Jon left several notes, and they did explain the why. It has taken me eight years to unravel the crazy of the last three minutes of our life together.

He was sick, and while I was in the room with him in that moment in time, I didn’t understand just how sick he really was.

Healing this wound has required me to examine our relationship, and it has led me to a place of forgiveness for the last three minutes of our married life. Forgiveness should never be done without thought. When we forgive, it doesn’t mean that we won’t remember what happened. We’re human, and humans can’t forget things. In time the pain can fade; the relationship can heal to something new. You can’t go back. That will never work.

Forgiveness is about being able to move forward with a new understanding and a new normal. It is about seeing an old rainbow in new ways. Forgiving is about growth and understanding by all parties involved. It is about authentic acceptance on both sides. It is also about realizing that the other involved person or persons may never be able to get to a place of doing authentic forgiveness.

There are reasons why someone may not ever be able to authentically forgive, and so the process backfires:

  • They are being rushed or pressured to move to the “forgive me or forgive someone else” place.
  • The religious may see forgiveness as a sign of healing and progression and lack the insight and understand that this can only happen when enough healing has occurred.
  • “Hug your brother or sister and say you’re sorry.” This one is a doozy! What this actually teaches children is that they don’t really need to think about the wrong they’ve done if they do an action and say two words. 
  • Forgiveness stems from our hearts and souls and has a spiritual base. 

There are also readiness factors for accepting someone’s apology:

  • Has enough personal work been done on the receiving end so that the matter can be discussed and resolved?
  • Is there clarity about how the new relationship will move forward? Have the appropriate changes been made?
  • Is there understanding that a new trust will need to be earned, and that trust takes time to build?
  • Can both parties agree to work on the trust in in an open manner?

Jon isn’t here for me to talk this out with him. I understand now just how sick he was, and that those three minutes of my life happened due to the fact that he was in unspeakable pain. If he were here, I’d now accept his words asking for forgiveness, and the relationship would move forward with new understanding, and we’d both grow. Today I miss Jon.

Jul 2

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Morning Has Come

The shouting, the screaming, the yelling that carries through the halls and walls of a home: the children cowering in rooms behind locked doors, curled up in balls at the bottom of a bed, hoping that if they do so, the noise will go away. It never does. They live in hopes that their parents will see the error of staying for the kids and end the terror of days and nights. They didn’t ask to be a part of this.

This is how you come to see me. This is how the secrets of lives get unbottled: slowly, gently, until they all spill out in their ugly horror. They fall to the ground for us to inspect, and when we dare to look, because we can no longer ignore what is present, we must come to realize and understand that the path we’ve been on can’t be walked alone. If we try to do the walk alone, it falls apart. We understand this because that is what we tried the last time, and it didn’t go well for us.

It is not reasonable to attempt to fix trauma by ourselves. To do so is risky. When you are in the forest, where it is dark, you need a light held for you so that you can navigate through the trees. The forest has goblins, witches, and wizards waiting for us. Some sit quietly, waiting to see what the trees tell us; still, others would cast spells. With the light, we see dimly to the next safe spot, and as we weave our way forward, the cries of the darkness begin to recede.

At times we stumble, and at other times we run forward, believing we see the light in its fulness, only to fall and injure ourselves. It is then we understand the value of the person with the flashlight. It is the guide who has been in the forest before. Guides understand the nature of the darkness. They run rivers and are willing to return to offer safe passage to others. These guides may or may not have run your river or walked through your forest. What they have faced is their own journey, and come out on the other end. 

We stand at the place of boarding, waiting to connect with the one who joins with us. We gently clasp hands, at first in timidity, and then more surely. Then we jointly launch ourselves into deep exploration.

In our transit to another place, there are codes that are both spoken and unspoken. It’s a sensing that the guide, able to transit us to new places, understands. In this place we learn from each other. We both have things to teach and to learn. 

Trauma is a teacher and guide if we allow it to be. It teaches us to be brave enough to heal and to listen for the lessons of the hidden passages. In healing, we discover unknown strengths and weaknesses, and we encounter questions that we didn’t want answers to and yet need so desperately. 

In discovery, we come to understand who we may have damaged along the way. We realize those we must part company with for our own well-being. We must also seek forgiveness from others we’ve harmed. The brokenness that we entered with is healing in ways we couldn’t imagine. Our bodies and our souls are made stronger for this experience, and as we see to the full light of day, we raise our heads high and walk slowly into the light of a new beginning, for morning has come.