Phantom Limbs

I am still here. Alive. Staying. Growing new parts. Among Friends. I miss you. I love you. I do feel you, and hear you, and am getting your messages. I hope you hear my heart speaking to you. It isn’t the same, and yet I am committed to continuing our long conversation, the one where we keep showing up, seeing what happens, and loving each other. I miss your hand in mine. The trees I lean up against are sturdy and living, but they don’t hug me back. I miss you. I love you.

I miss him like crazy. I talk to him all the time. But, it is his physical presence that I long for so deeply. It is an ache. He was such a comfort to be near. I find that it is a constant shuffling between the mind, body, and spirit. Anyone of them can be so alluring that I will abandon the others. I will immerse myself in some physical comfort (or the lightness of soul, or the logic of mind) believing for a bit that I have found the one way through this utter heartbreak. It is hard to remember that I must allow myself to simultaneously be supported mentally (emotionally), physically, and spiritually. The physical deficits of not having Edmond, though, lately are really taking a toll. I am a regular for pedicures and massage. Human touch is critical.

There are hospital volunteers who hold premature or unwell babies in the NICU. The babies need human touch, and probably so do the volunteers. The babies need to be held and cuddled so they will thrive, grow their lungs, and become healthy, resilient beings. There should be a place we can go for this later in life too, when we lose our dearest and most precious ones. There should be a place for people who lose their partners, children, friends, or parents where volunteers are the surrogates for those missing their person. There should be a room with comfortable seating and soft lighting where we can lean up against welcoming, comforting bodies. I miss my Person so much, and I’m not shattering, not today. I just miss his body near mine.

Growing new parts is the thing that happens when I stay, when I show up. It’s the same with trees. So many are missing limbs from freezes and droughts we witnessed together. New branches are growing from other places on the trunk. These limbs have a new trajectory, and scars remain where other limbs have fallen, been cut away, or died. The new growth is inevitable. Like humans, the tree’s desire to continue to stay and grow are compelling. I wonder if trees feel phantom limbs like people sometimes do who lose an arm or leg? The new growth, I hate it and love it. It is. I do not want to grow without you, and I do it anyway. I can’t help it. It is being human and staying. And, I hear you. I know you are asking me to keep going.  

The bigger message I keep getting is that it is all about the layers of love. It is another layer of love to keep loving Edmond and feeling him love me in our new condition and circumstance. It is a loss, the old way that we were, a tremendous loss. And, as I grieve that loss of the way we used to love, I step into the shadow of the depth of our loving. The shadow of our grief is as long and wide as our love. If we do not grieve, we dishonor the love.

The message is to keep loving others better, especially those that are sometimes hard to love. We must learn to love from a deeper place, a place of near stillness where we are rooted trees with wings. From this rooted place we allow ourselves to love from a place of acceptance of what is. If we can bind the love and the grieving, to see them as one, it is easier to let go of what falls away as new growth or death occurs. This kind of loving also requires that we allow ourselves to be loved from that same depth. The bigger message doesn’t make Edmond’s death and absence less painful.

I do what I am told by Beings of Light who are my guides on this path. I cannot always see as far ahead as those who lead the way, and I trust them. My dear friend Carol has guided me through some treacherous and dark waters. She has led me with compassion and prayer around blind corners to the wider path. She encouraged me to move in directions that have sometimes been counterintuitive. Many years ago, she encouraged me to carve out time for myself when life was pulling me in many directions and often to tend various crises. I listened. I carved out the space anyway.

I spent years cultivating sacred space for myself, and it made me more present and compassionate as a parent to five children and a partner to Edmond. These sacred quiet times happened in fits and spurts at first. It was frustrating at times. It required a concerted effort to carve them out, and once I came to know them like a precious friend, I wanted more.

And, after Edmond died, I could not imagine being “alone” with space and time, being with myself. I was terrified of the space that was going to naturally open up when William and Ellie went back to school last week. Now, I have had some, a taste, and I am recognizing I need it more than I expected. With the kids back in school since Monday, I see the difference. It is time to be quiet, and to talk to Edmond and hear him more easily. If it is noisy in the house on a busy day, I make an excuse to walk the dogs, to get outside, and talk to him and be with myself. I am grateful for Carol as a Guide in my life and the possibility for the time/space. I am finding I need more quiet time to myself, not less. It is not terrifying but soothing, comforting even. 

I realized the other day that I wrote our story, or at least the beginning and the end, before we ever met. Or, rather, I started to write them. From time to time over the years, I have finessed them a bit, visited with them, but both are far from complete. I have not thought of them much in more than seven years. One was a short story I showed you in the first part of our time together. You really liked it, and the other was a smattering of scenes or chapters written in no particular order for a novel. As I remember those stories now, one was our beginning, learning to communicate and connect. The other was our devastating, unexpected ending of life here together. It is the physical ache of waking up without you—that is how the story begins, and it may even be the first line. Perhaps I will finish them both one day. Maybe the stories will meet in the middle, in the in-between that we lived out here together. 

We are all energy, everything is energy that cannot be destroyed only transformed. I long to feel his hand in mine and his arms around me. I try to feel his phantom limbs that are no longer here but surely have transformed into some other energy that I can imagine might still be able to hold me. I imagine his arms around me, squeezing me tight not letting me fall apart. Sometimes, I can feel his strength holding me together, carrying me through the day. 

Most days, I find time to lay on my back in the water under the heat of the afternoon sun, arms outstretched as I stare upward at the swaying trees and sky scattered with shapeshifting clouds. I hear the hawks calling. I look, but I do not see them. I know they are nearby, hunting along the dried out creek bed. I hear him whisper messages. I feel his presence. I cannot see him, and I know he is here with me, with us.