No Safe Distance

From Neutral to New Trail

Just a couple weeks ago or so I said I was feeling a little "eh" about life...neutral...could take it or leave it.

That's not true any more.

I know it seems like a fast change, but that's only because I haven't been blogging very regularly. It's a change that has been months in the making, I think, as the entire experience of being with Michael in life and seeing him through his death is being incorporated into my psyche.

And as I noted in my last post, I'm in a new life now. A life that I am finding I DO have enthusiasm for, and not only when people have enthusiasm for me (though that surely does delight me when it happens).

I had to do a fair amount of pushing to get myself going with my new venture against the grief-induced inertia of the past year and more. I have certainly learned a great deal in the process (about grief and photography both). I've learned much in regard to the technical aspects of what I do, but even more importantly I've become aware that there is no such thing as going back to some prior state of "normalcy" after you lose someone as significant as Michael was to me. And you don't get over that loss, either. At least that is my experience. The impact of that relationship is becoming incorporated, an inherent part of my own makeup now.

In an odd way, I feeling more like 'me' than I've ever felt before...a truer version of me, a more authentically expressed version, a freer version.

Things I've wanted to do forever, like being disciplined about my daily contemplative practices, are now happening without much effort. And while I don't feel much the effort of discipline, I do feel the import of holding close to my values and living them, in a devoted and conscious fashion.

Sounds really heavy, or maybe just esoteric when I say it like that, but it's a lot more simple than that. There isn't anything cumbersome or dramatic about it. I just promised myself that I would put my centering time first, without compromise and without a quick check on my phone for messages and emails when starting my morning. I've gone back to drinking tea after drinking coffee in the morning most of this past year. I light a candle. I sit and wait for my mind to stop urging me to quickly check my messages and when I'm a little bit more settled in my chair I do some centering readings.

You'd be amazed at what a difference reading a single page of inspiration and guidance can do for a day. Or maybe you wouldn't. I am though. I know what I was like without that one simple action and I know what I am like with it. It's a practice Michael himself kept to. He used to tell me to cling to my practices as though my life depended on it. For the first time I'm really feeling why.

It took Michael not being here for me to get to this point.

I used to think he was superhuman in his discipline. Actually, he was, but only because what he was doing worked so well. I can't imagine starting a day any other way now, simply for all of the cold hard evidence I am amassing that it is making me a better person just for dedicating those 15 or 20 minutes of focus.

When he was here, I admit I used Michael as a spiritual crutch. I would race around like a nut all week and he would fix me every Friday just by his very presence. I felt, many times, as though my cells were actually being rearranged in his presence. I'd feel myself let go in ways I didn't even know I had been holding on.

And then he left and I had to face the fact that I wasn't nearly as good as I was trying to lead everyone to believe. Before you knew it, I was snapping at people, irritable, isolating, and sad sad sad. I was deeply grieving and even saw that as a failure because I could not have been more prepared for the loss of him.

Now I still cry, but I no longer see it as a failure. There are times when I deeply miss the man. I loved him in a way that I don't think I'll ever find the words to express.

But there are also times that I don't miss him.

In fact, there are times when I am grateful he is no longer here. That is not the same as being glad he is not here. Not by a long shot.

I keep recalling Ram Dass saying he became closer to his teacher after his teacher died.

I'm learning more and more these days in ways I can tell you with certainty I would not be learning if Michael were still here. The day to day concerns of his life, and all my focus on that, were keeping me locked in to a certain vantage point. Without that, I can see more than I did before.

My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.

So, that last post, about being in a new life where people don't know Michael, or know about him...there is a level where that isn't true at all. I am an expression of everything I have experienced in this life and the influence of the last many years is so interwoven I see evidence of it everywhere I turn.

He's gone, but not really.

Michael was so complete when he left that it's impossible for me to wish for his return, even for a second. His suffering was so great but to say I'm glad for his suffering to be over is too simplistic. He was 100% ready to go. What I saw in him spiritually in his final months was so astounding...to be with someone who was complete in that sense and full in the knowledge that he had done what he came here to do...I'm hard pressed to find words to describe it. It simply isn't necessary for him to be here anymore.

And despite my missing his earthly companionship, I do feel like Ram Dass in that earlier comment. That sounds so crazy but it's true. I understand more about Michael and how he achieved that sense of completion that I did when he was here, in no small part because he isn't here any more. And I also have a very strong feeling that I'm only at the early stages of this deeper understanding. Michael said when I am in a wheelchair someday (since so many people do end up that way in old age), that I would learn even more. He, himself, knew that he would be teaching me long after his earthly existence was done. His surety and confidence in that was another aspect of this completion I saw him reach. He just didn't see his body as too necessary to his work any more. It sounds so wrong to say that I agree with him because we are supposed to want people we love to be with us forever and ever. Nonetheless, I can't deny what I'm learning to be true. His passing has put me at a different vantage point, out of the day to day worrying about him and into that curious space of my own life without him, or my father, as the focus of my daily activities. I'm evolving past where I could have otherwise. Or maybe it's more accurate to say I'm evolving through...not past.

That "now what?" period of neutrality I was in for quite a while was fascinating. Of course, there was a level where it wasn't hard...the level of "okay, I'll start working on my photography". But there was an entirely different level that was much less anchored. I was learning so much from both Michael and through my caregiving experience with my father that when they ended it just felt like there was nothing else to do. I just didn't see the point.

It wasn't that I was suicidal or didn't want to live. It was simply that, for someone who is so enamored of what life is teaching her, having all the apparent lessons being over made me wonder what the point was of life...kind of like graduating from college but finding yourself still living in the dorm. It just didn't make any sense.

Just hanging around being alive didn't seem too interesting to me. I could make dinner, do the laundry, see to the needs of my delicate canine companion, hang out with my loving husband, take in a hockey game or a concert, have lunch with friends...and there is nothing wrong with that in the least. It's a very nice life, actually. But it just didn't seem to be growing me. I didn't want to just be here comfortable and entertained.

Getting involved in my photography helped, but it still didn't feel like it had the juice for me. One one hand, I've now had the satisfaction of seeing my work in print and I feel complete with that. However, there are a few shots that...well, they haunt me. Summer's End is one of them.

I've had stirrings that told me there was more to the story...that this wasn't about being done and finding pleasant ways to fill my time until my heart gives out and I breathe my last breath. There IS more. It's just that for the first time my head isn't in charge of it.

Very new territory for me.

And even as I feel the grief continue I can also tell you, and Michael told me this would happen for me, that there has been tremendous grace in his leaving. It's not bad to lose a crutch. Losing Michael was painful. Losing the crutch he provided has started to change my life in ways that would not be happening if he were still here. And the ways I see myself deepening are ways that I know are necessary. I thought I was the best person I could be while he was here and that I'd be less than that with him gone. I was wrong. All of those parts of me that I saw emerging with him, and while caring for my father, are still there and still developing. And without them here for me to focus my energies on those parts of me are finding themselves extending in new directions. I'm still evolving. There's something reassuring in that.

Shazam

"Are you Laura? There is a woman who said she has to meet you."

And that is how my evening at the Oak Park Art League began, me introducing myself to a woman who found herself seeing my name next to each print she found herself drawn to. And if I hadn't worked so hard on so many levels to be where I find myself now, I would tell you it's a little disorienting.

Shazam! I'm an artist at an opening reception, and there is Peter, and we're clinking paper cups of wine while recalling when he told me he I should show my work, and that he'd come to the reception, and he'd be in a black turtle neck with trendy eyewear, and I'd be actually doing it, this 'photography thing" I kept saying I'd try to "do something with" someday.

It's a new life.

I'm meeting people who don't know anything about me, other than I'm an artist. That just seems to be an accepted fact of my existence. I don't need to draw any bridges. As far as the people who are meeting me are concerned, I could have sprung from Zeus' head. No past careers. No blog posts. No anything but the work on the wall.

And no Michael.

It's just me and the work on the wall.