Have you ever wondered just what in the hell was happening in your life? Like seriously, what in the world is going on with this thing?! Sometimes, it seems like things are going just as you’d like them too. Other times, it seems like somebody is playing a cruel joke on you and you’re left feeling like someone is about to yell “WORLDSTAR!”
It’s easy to get stuck in the habit of thinking, “what if I had done this..?” or, “what if that didn’t happen..?” In fact, it’s more comfortable sometimes to try and fantasize about how things could be different than it is to figure out how to live in your new reality. Grief has a way of doing that to you. Maybe you try and piece together all the little things you “should have” noticed or even how the completed puzzle before you was SO obvious… maybe it’s actually still incomplete. Grief can easily get you stuck in the maybe’s and what if’s of life in addition to making you feel like if you could just get more control… you’d be better prepared the next time it decides to show up. It’s all BS though… you can never control it. The best thing you can do is try to prepare yourself with ways to cope, healing practices and fortify your support systems. You know better. We all know better but we do this unhelpful, hamster-on-a-wheel act with ourselves all the time, ultimately going nowhere.
I don’t know what you believe. Do you believe that someone/something/some deity is ordering your steps? Do you believe that your life is laid out somewhere with a list of things that are going to happen to you regardless? Do you believe there are a variety to pre-set paths… courses your life can take? Do you believe it’s all chaotic and happenstance? Do you go to psychics or fortune tellers in hopes of gaining a peak behind that veil? Many of us, myself included, have done this and continue to do so. It’s just so damn hard sometimes to sit back at wait for things to just happen to you. The thing is, you’re never really going to know until it happens. The gifted may be able to give you a snapshot but the details are what living is all about.
Bae and I were talking the other day and she said, “it’s like we’re walking forward, backwards.” Our life is moving along in time… forward but it’s like our backs are turned so we can’t see it what’s coming. We see things as they happen and potentially get a glimpse out of our periphery of what’s soon to come. But it’s only once the events are upon us that we actually recognize what they are and furthermore, it’s only once we create some distance from them that we see more of the puzzle.
The struggle is in the waiting and the experiencing of each event (especially the hurtful ones) without the benefit of understanding how it fits. Our loss has done some amazing things. It brought an incredible amount of sorrow and depression and grief and pain and frustration and fatigue and heartbreak. I could go on but you get it. Our loss also opened our life to a whole other world of work, advocacy, connection and purpose. I’ve mentioned this before but one of the main things that came out of those beautifully muddy waters was this blog. There are other things that have occurred and some HUGE things that seem to be coming down the pike. Goodness… I am in awe of the things that have happened even through the pain and I honestly don’t think they would be happening if I could’ve seen them coming. I know for a FACT that I would have voided losing the girls if I could have. I’ve chosen to believe that they were what some call martyr spirits. They come to show us something, teach us something, open us to something but they know from the very beginning that they won’t stay. We loosely talked about that in therapy recently and guess what happened? The door blew open…
So we’re going to keep walking forward, backwards. We’re going to keep trudging along and attempting to step carefully but together. We’re going to weather the storms that come and bask in the sunshine that follows recognizing that ALL of it is part of the whole picture. The life you’ve created may not all make sense in the moment but I believe you can’t just stop in your tracks to try and make sense of what isn’t finished. It won’t work and there’s more to come.
Oh, I love the concept of Martyr Angels! I’ve never heard of that before, but it reasonates so much with how I feel about my angel babies!