moving through it

Met with my therapist again today.  Yes, I have one.  Here's the thing.  Everyone needs to grieve.  It's not an option.  I don't need anyone to tell me that.  I'm naturally reflective.  No surprise there I know. It comes pretty natural to me.  It's exhausting though to sit and cry in front of a stranger.  And I have no ability to hold it back right now.   Sometimes I feel like, "why am I doing this?", but in reality, it is what I need.  It validates my feelings.  It allows me to express myself in a safe place.  It helps to let someone else hear my heart and tell me things in a different way that I am already experiencing. 

Just as I was feeling a little too vulnerable and as though maybe this wasn't where I needed to be, I began talking about how I've always believed one of the greatest things we can do in life is to help take the sting out of it for someone who is experiencing something hard or painful.  It occurred to me that I DO take on other's pain in a real and raw way.  People I intensely love.  Like Edd.  He often said, "I think this is harder on you than it is on me"... Could that have been true?   I didn't think so at the time.  He may have felt some of my hurt too.   But today I realized that I had double the pain.  Not only did I feel acutely my own, but I felt (or imagined) his as well. 

When I was watching Edd's suffering, helping him through it and being a support or caregiver and all that goes with it, I thought, "when all this is over I am going to need some serious grief counseling" because I didn't have time to think about it at the time.   I just did what needed to be done and tried as hard as I could to be strong... for him.  It was what needed to be done, but now I am left with all of it still...  the memories.  Feeling it, remembering it all. Processing it.  Feeling it all over again.  I didn't have time then to grieve or cry or sort it out.  I watched his emotional and physical pain and felt it and mine in all its enormity.

So... I understood today that it's not just the pain of loss... of separation... of not wanting to let him go... that I feel, as if that isn't painful enough... It's also the accumulation of pain and grief from seeing him suffer and how I internalized all of that for oh so long.... I wanted sooo much to ease his suffering, somehow take it away from him, that I took it on myself.  I felt it all...his and mine.   And that is what I am dealing with now. 

So... again... we are all changed by one another, aren't we?  To a certain degree.  I have this love that is no longer in my life with a deep desire to channel it somewhere.  A desire for expression that has no where to go.  Wanting to keep that sense of connection with him somehow.   To honor him with some kind of perfect expression. 

How to do that?  I don't know.  It is still to be discovered.

Path