It seems the urge to write is slowly returning, not so much out of some misplaced sense of obligation but rather because I seem to miss this space.
It struck me recently that this year marks ten years since my husband, George, died. It is not something I think about much any more, although that is not because I have forgotten, or he was not an important part of my life. His presence is always with me, as is my ever-present but unspoken acknowledgement of how his presence shaped the person I am today.
All of this to say that I don't know why that number, ten, resonates so deeply with me today. It is not the anniversary of any specific date. I didn't expect to be writing this post. Actually I started out writing about sewing, but something shifted, and that post got turned aside. Perhaps my brain is just seeking out patterns, of trying to make sense of life. It struck me, that this year, the year after a few had years, hard years for everyone, I am not one to say that my struggles or any harder than other person's, has proven to be a year of closure and of new beginnings. And the tenth anniversary of a loss also marks a closure of its own sort.
A year or two, perhaps two, after George died, a very wise woman, a retired psychiatrist told me that, in her experience, many people took a long time to recover from the loss of a long-term spouse. She mentioned something about ten years or so, which struck me, because all the pop-psych google-type gobbledygook that grieving takes one year, as if any human experience can be reduced to a simple formula. I know now of course that so little of grief is about the initial rending of loss. There is the loss of the beloved, the loss of a part of one's very psyche, the painful process of redefinition, of reforming who one is as one instead of a part of two, and then after all those wounds have been healed and the scars have faded there is the process of learning who one has become, what new growth has come forth.
I suppose it is not so far from so much of life: leaving the sanctity of the womb to be born, leaving home, making a new home, making a family, fledging that very family. Careers, roles, life choices, all roll across our paths. We all have many paths, many selves, and this is just another branch off that same tree. I am not trying to lessen anything here, this is simply the space I find myself inhabiting today.
I think that what has actually struck me today is that I've had lots of goals, lots of roles or careers, or whatever you want to call them. I've made lots of plans. Some have gone sideways. Some have not. This particular iteration of me doesn't really have any plans. Oh a few short term thoughts here and there, but basically I am much more open to just letting things happen than my younger self might have been, even my ten-years-younger self. It has been an eventful ten years. Ten years since George died. Eleven year since leaving New York State and moving to Tennessee. Nine years post back surgery. Six years post buying a house on my own and moving yet again. Four years post renovating said house. Two years post breast cancer. One year post a flirtation with heart-failure and a series of cardioversions and ablations and finally slowing down uncontrollable atrial flutter.
I know who I am and I also know that I know nothing. I don't know what I am doing. I don't know what tomorrow brings. I actually don't need to know either of those things. Whatever happens is going to happen whatever I think about it. I am 65 years old and I don't need to have a plan. I don't need to change the world. I've done my time, made my plans, conquered, failed, started over. I know the world can't break me unless I let it. That is all the strength I need. Now I just need to be open to whatever is going to happen. Or perhaps it is just that I am willing to admit I don't have any choice in what the world does. But I do have a choice in how I embrace the world.
Somehow, that last sentence feels like Christmas to me.
