Bloom: Creating New Life After Loss.
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There are tiny green buds starting to pop up on the trees in Anchorage, and I have a sense of synchronicity with those hopeful flecks. They will bloom soon, bringing new life to the grit left from a long, gray winter.
As I write these words, it has now been three months since my brother passed away, and I find myself standing on the precipice of spring looking back over my shoulder at the steps I have journeyed since. They are jagged and disparate, crooked and uneven with no order to them other then they are landmarks along my passage of grief.
I have lived the fact that grief is a confusing process. Loss creates a sense of internal lawlessness that knows no rules or bounds.
Your psyche devolves into disarray as the constructs and schemas you have built your sense of reality on tumble down, obliterated. What you believed to be true turns on its head, and it’s so mentally disorienting it is difficult to know which way is up. Gravity doesn’t exist in the thick of grief.
The way you once saw the world becomes an ideological pile of debris you are forced to sort, as your neural networks turn into traffic jams and dead-end roads and abrupt cliffs of irresolution, while you search for the answer of what it means for someone to cease.
I spend my winter attempting to reorder and categorize the debris any way I can. I listen to thoughtful music that sings about loss and finding life after.
I make photo albums of my brother and I, seeking answers as to how things got from there to here, so I can try and make sense of this abrupt rupture in our timeline, even as I realize it will never make sense.
I write my heart out trying to describe the devastation I feel, penning words like, “Trying to control grief is like trying to corral the Wild West with a toy badge and a squirt gun. My best defenses fall like plastic horses. Grief’s stampede renders chaos unordered.”
I research grief models, pondering how different the stages of grief look on a clinical chart when compared to the actual experience of living them. Because my experience is feeling all of those stages at the same time, like a giant mass of emotive finger paints all mixed together with a tiny dot in the middle that says: You are here.
I decide that chaos and love are the best words I can find to describe my stages of loss. Chaos my passage through the land of grief where anarchy reigns supreme. Love my lifeline to hope.
I write a letter to Life telling it I quit, even though I don’t know exactly what I am quitting. It is more of a confession, an acknowledgment, that I have come to the ends of something inside myself and that I need to be shown the way through.
I have been a student of life long enough to know that everything is a teacher, if we let it.
I am a grudging, resentful student with this particular teacher, understandably resistant to its horrible lessons, all while still knowing, no matter how terrible, loss can be a catalyst for growth. That any undoing, any shedding, any losing creates new space where life has room to pour new things into us.
Endings are a genesis for potential. Metamorphosis happens in the void when we have to find a way through the darkness. It is the metaphorical space where the caterpillar reaches the end of his world and becomes a butterfly: desperation providing the ingredients for inspiration, chaos the material for creation.
It can feel like a terrible thing when life brings us to the end of the world as we know it, to the end of something inside ourselves. When we can’t see anything but black space beyond the current space we know, and we are left to trust that if we go forward, relinquish control and have faith in the process, we will discover our own chrysalis.
We all have our own paths to this precipice of change. We arrive through loss of relationship, through hardship and difficulty, through illness and injury. Through the end of a chapter we sometimes realize we were done writing long before we set down the pen.
At times we are deposited here unceremoniously when we suddenly lose something we never believed we would lose, and we find ourselves at the mercy of Life’s forces.
We are brought here so we can choose whether to contract in fear, trying to squeeze ourselves back into an old shell of self that no longer fits, or to expand in faith, venturing into the black space of the unknown, believing we will find new ground if we are brave enough to see the journey through.
The journey requires a great deal of release, for it is only in letting go of how we think things should be, that we can develop into who we are meant to be. We are undone, so we can become.
This season of sadness, this crooked path of grief, this aftermath of internal chaos: I slowly find gifts of becoming here. I learn to show up for myself and be present with my own experience of loss, not trying to minimize or distract or avoid, but simply acknowledging it as it comes and honoring my process as best I know how.
My husband and I make a concrete decision to stop talking about moving to Kauai and actually move next year. We dare Life to make a way in the upcoming months ahead, knowing our tomorrows are not guaranteed. Best to live your dreams now.
I write a poetry book filled with words of light and goodness and prepare a manuscript for submission. With every edit and revision and keystroke, I think about what a dark period Life has handed me, even as my hopeful phraseology says, “I still believe in your sun though it is hidden behind the clouds.”
I breathe. I talk to the sky. My broken heart continues to expand with the very thing that ails it: Love. I choose to believe Life supports me in my time of need, and as I keep doing all these things, the sun begins to peek through the clouds. Sometimes it even stays for most of the day.
When we can’t see the sun through the clouds, it is easy to forget that Life will not abandon us if we stay the course. Life will not forsake us if we move through it with sincere intent. Life will support us in becoming our authentic selves.
Sometimes this means we just keep moving forward, every day a step in a new direction which will eventually reveal a beautiful destination.
Sometimes this means we take deep breaths and keep trying to bring ourselves back to a space of love every time we feel lost.
And sometimes this means we will be asked to step blindly into an unknown we do not understand, nor can see our way through, and the best we can do is keep trying to trust that new life will be waiting on the other side.
Life doesn’t bring us to the edge in order to abandon us to the darkness, Life brings us here so we can learn to make a way for more light. For without the light, however will we have what we need to bloom?
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BethAnne Kapansky Wright is a Clinical Psychologist finding joy and light from her tiny corner of Anchorage, Alaska. She writes poetry and personal essays and enjoys photography and creating whimsical art. She can often be found on top of the nearest mountain or running through the trails in her beloved woods. She is the author of the poetry chapbook ‘The Art of Becoming’, and is inspired by nature, love, her awesome husband and fur family, and the beautiful journey of becoming more fully human. She can be found blogging tidbits and snippets of poetry and other random thoughts on her website.
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