King of Hearts

February 13, 2013

I have been looking at pictures of Ron the past couple days and instead of seeing his smiling face with those deep dimples and twinkling eyes, I could only picture him lying in his plain pine casket, frozen in time.  From somewhere deep inside my soul, someplace in the far reaches of my heart came an unexpected, racking sob.  I felt empty and alone in a way I hadn't remembered since the night he died.  I remembered the coolness of his hand in mine as I said my final goodbye and the roughness of his stubbly face against my cheek as I kissed him for the very last time.  It is a body memory that stays with me to this day.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, the day of hearts and flowers and sweetly wrapped sparkly surprises.  Tomorrow is the day for love and lovers.  There will be red hearts everywhere I look.  Red hearts which used to represent the bond of two people joined together by love, time and history. Now, hearts represent betrayal and loss.  You see, it was a heart that betrayed our love - not the esoteric wanderlust heart, but the muscle and sinew of the pumping orb that sustains life heart.  The four chambers and valves that together create the tick-tock of ones life-force.  It was, in the end, a heart that took him from me forever. 

Tomorrow is also the 14th.  The anniversary day of Ron's death.  It will be 8 months - not a particularly remarkable milestone but it still brings up so much hurt, pain and sadness.  It's been 8 months already!  I miss that man so much.  His silly antics, determined way he would go about a project, the way he scratched my back and helped me calm at night so I could sleep.  I miss his hugs - and we hugged a lot.   I miss the way he looked at our beautiful daughter with such overwhelming love.  He has missed so much as well.  Our life - the one we were supposed to live together until old and grey, he is missing.

Tomorrow, I will miss his secretive escape to the store to buy flowers for his girls and for me.  He always brought my older daughter a dozen roses - always.  When she was 9 yrs old when he bought her very own flower vase.  He handed the roses to her and said "I always want you to know how special you are and how you deserve to be treated by a man."  Her eyes would sparkle and her smile lit up the room.  She had never received flowers before for Valentine's Day.  Ron set the bar and he set it high.  When Alexandra was born, he started with a single rose in a bud vase and soon she had her very own flower vase too.  It became one of those expectations that still gave us all a spark of excitement. We knew we were getting flowers, but the color was a surprise.  After a few years, he created a rose color code.  Ron would say - "Mama gets red because she is the Goddess/Queen of the house.  Megan gets a darker pink because she is an older princess and Alexandra gest either white or light pink - for the little princess."  It was so special for all of us but Ron loved it most of all.  He, after all was the King of his home and he loved nothing more than to see us happy. I have debated whether or not I should continue his tradition or just leave it with his memory.  I almost can't bear to see Megan's face handing her a dozen roses knowing that it would be a reminder of the thorns and how delicate and painful such memories can be.

Tomorrow, I will do my best to smile and allow others their special day of love, but inside I will be mourning again the loss of love and innocence of the heart.

Cleansing Breaths

 

As a Registered Nurse who has helped hundreds, if not thousands of women through the labor & birthing process and taught hundreds of childbirth classes, I have touted the benefits of the cleansing breath many times over the past 20 years.  The transformation that takes place as you combine the act of drawing in clean, pure, white light air to fill your lungs along with imagery of how that air and light bring with it healing and the ability to grab hold of the dark, scary, toxic elements that reside in every cell.  Then, the exhale that takes with it the toxins and debris, ridding the body of negativity and darkness that pollutes ones intention and purpose.  I have preached the importance of that simple deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth, knowing the next contraction could be strong enough to take the breath away.  The grief process, much like labor contractions, come in waves. That breath in between the surges can mean the difference between maintaining control and consciousness and completely losing yourself to the overwhelming pain of loss, diving into the darkened water-filled caverns of fear, anxiety and depression.

I wondered to myself in the days and weeks after Ron's death would this pain ever go away?  Would I ever again be able to think about tomorrow without my heartbeat increasing, jumping into my throat and sweat forming on my brow?  When might I finally be able to think and process like a normal person again?  When would I have the chance to put my head above the surface and take a breath?  It seemed like the storm surges were coming one after the other and I was slowly drowning, falling deeper and deeper into the abyss.  I am grateful for my ability to breathe through the pain of Ron's death as I can stand today saying, "I am not a victim of the deep, I am still walking in the sunlight, occasionally allowing a song to move my feet in dance."

These past two weeks, I have had to take numerous cleansing breaths to get past the waves of anxiety and anger that have come up while dealing with my older daughter and her struggle with heroin addiction and recovery and the realization that I am having to face this immeasurable fear alone. The fear of her choices and the potential deadly results should she take her sobriety and recovery lightly and relapse. I do not have my husband to lean on and I must seek my own inner strength to get through the moments and days ahead.  I fear this thing called addiction and what it can do to someone so seemingly normal and perfect - my child.  It provokes the most animal like behaviors of base survival and avoidance of society.  It turns the sweet into dangerous and sickly sour.  Her addiction bleeds into my life and those around her because we are all somewhat enmeshed in her choices and results.  We all want to see her happy and successful.   So, we wait for the other shoe to drop.  I wait, and wonder will she make it?  Will she live?  Will she CHOOSE to live? Again, I am ever grateful for the tools I have learned along the journey of being a Multi-Generational Mom.  I do not attach myself as much to my children's results, while I do have fear and anxiety,  I can separate myself from the choices knowing that I do not cause them and therefore I can not cure them.  I am an observer and spectator to her life.   I do not get to dictate or decide for her, I can't make her change.  The only person I can change is me.

As I am dealing with my daughter and her addiction/recovery, I am also dealing with my own "addiction" issue - sugar.  I have been eating clean going on 4 weeks now and I dealt with my own setback a couple days ago.  My younger daughter's school is doing a See's Candy Valentine's fundraiser and I thought it might be OK to have "just one" piece of chocolate.  What I learned is one is too many and a thousand isn't enough.  I had three pieces, felt like crap and threw the box away.  I have some information that I didn't have before - more definitive information - sugar is not my friend.

From this information, I am now having to dig a little deeper into some core issues and how sugar used to act like my friend and comfort me when life was not so sweet.  I used sugar to cover up the icky feelings of stress, anxiety, fear, disappointment and loss.  Even though I feel like some things in my life are not so "sweet", I know that I can no longer use sugar for medicine.  My new choice is to look again at breathing, paying attention to my body's clues and messages and taking care of me in a new and extraordinary way.  With my Radical Shifts Journey, I am now adding exercise!  Exercise will invoke the need to breathe - deep cleansing breaths to fill up the spaces and gaps left behind by the pain of Ron's sudden and unexpected death and the anxiety over my daughter's addiction.  Those two perfect storms crashing together that had the potential to take me to the depths of despair.  Exercise will generate the positive feedback and endorphins to lift me above and beyond the chaos and sadness.  It will help me on my journey to be healthier and fit.  I choose to live too.  Not just to live, but to LIVE HEALTHY.  I will not allow these storms get the best of me.

Of course, as storms usually do, the clouds have cleared somewhat and the surges settled.  I feel like the waves of grief and anxiety come less often these days and I am able to take those nice deep cleansing breaths, regenerating and rejuvenating my mind, body and soul. I will survive Ron's death and my daughter's addiction/recovery because I am a survivor.  I will survive because I choose to LIVE.

Namaste.