#26 Cut & Paste

Choose something written during this course, Print it out, and cut it into sections. With scissors. Separate sentences or blocks of short text. Keep sentences, or complete phrases intact, but not more than a line or two in one chunk. Lay out your pieces of paper. You now have lots of puzzle pieces. Move them around. Disorder and re-order them. What new stories or ideas link up together as you move the parts around? What do you notice? Can you create a new piece out of rearranged parts? Do you learn anything new, or find any new directions here? Watch for new sparks in your mind as you put things together in different ways.

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

My grief is just below the surface at all times. My love of Ben is still deeply within me. Something is missing. I am miserable. The light has gone out and it IS so much darker. I have lost my beloved son and my mourning is during a lock down and massive social unrest. Misery piled upon misery.

I feel like my heart has been impaled by something very sharp, like a knife. I have a ‘hole’ in my heart where it was once ‘whole.” My loss of Ben is still deeply with me. The middle is missing. A shift in my grief, even a tiny one, means that I am beginning to heal.

At the beginning, I remember feeling I couldn’t breathe and not being able to eat. I was so radioactive with grief. I could only see the loneliness and pain of Ben’s suicide, and the loneliness and pain of my grief.

Do I want to suffer? No.

Do I want to forget Ben? No.

I can already feel a shift in my grief. I remember counting the days, and now I count the weeks, since Ben’s death. What does this say about loss and love? I don’t know.

My heart is not ‘broken’ per se. It still works. I can love and I can accept love. I seem to have graduated from my All-Black daze.

Do I want to love Ben forever? Yes.

Do I want to heal? Yes.

This is still unfamiliar and unknown territory for me. I cannot help but take the next step forward, not away from the person I have loved but towards a new way of living without that person: Ben. Dreaming of the sweetness and the joy of our together.