Saturday, January 4, 2014

Turning Pain to Love


In 2012, when his death was so fresh, I needed to talk. About the pain, the fear, the agony, the anger, the loss, the accident, the future we will not have, the children we won't raise, the wedding we won't share… all of it. I wanted to crawl out of my skin with all the pain. I talked and cried almost every single day to someone about my pain. I talked to everyone. Even inappropriately so.

No literally… I have told my story - complete with shameless tears - to perfect strangers. Including customers at the gallery I worked at, a seamstress I had hemming a pair of pants for me, and my masseuse. Really anyone was prey to my grief attacks for about a year there. Sometimes it ended up weird or awkward, but most of the time, it didn't.

Most of the time, it would allow them to share something really vulnerable in their life (the seamstress it turns out was a widow herself many years back, and has since remarried to a wonderful man), or help them simply feel honored that I would trust them enough to share. Almost every time, we both ended up in tears and hugging each other. It turns out, it doesn't really matter if we know each other - we can all give that exchange to one another just by listening and honoring one another where we are.

Looking back, I can begin to understand it this way:
Sharing pain transforms it back into love. I stretch out my arms - with a piece of my pain held in my hands - to someone, to anyone who will have it. It is always a risk that they will not reach back, always, but I know I need to try if my heart is to survive this without becoming hardened. So I reach and I show them my pain. And my hope is that they reach back. And usually, they do. They take that small piece of my pain in their hands. They see it, touch it, come to know it. They turn it over in their hands and take it to their hearts and feel it for a moment. And then they give it back to me, but when it is returned to my hands… miraculously, every time, I find that it is no longer pain at all, but love. They have completely transformed that one small piece - with nothing more than a simple act of acknowledging it, and therefore acknowledging me.

Because our pain, you see, is really just the part of ourselves that has loved fully and deeply and come to be broken. When we give a piece of it to someone, and they receive it with compassion, they can return it back to us as love - as it once was. To me, this has been what healing is about. Taking the chance to be vulnerable and share my pain, bit by bit, day by day… reaching my hands out again and again and again… each time holding a single grain of sand from the desert of pain that resides in my heart. And each time receiving back a single grain of love.

It is a lifelong process, grain by grain. And no, we never do turn all those grains back into love. There will always be some pain amidst our hearts, but looking at it this way helps me to see how every person who has touched my life - and everyone who will - helps me to transform my pain back into love. He did this for me too, well before I was aware. Our vulnerability with each other helped us to turn each other's pain from the days before we met back to love. And now, by the force of his death, I am having to learn a new way to do this. It is time to let others be part of that journey… let them turn my pain back to love, and give the same back to them. I am hoping that by sharing this, it does a little of that for both you and me.

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9 comments:

  1. Sarah, I lost the love of my life within 5 days of yours (that's an instant connection with you for me). I look so forward to your writings. But this one is so amazing, I already know it has touched me forever. The grains of pain turning into love, thank you from the bottom of my heart!,

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    1. I'm so sorry for your loss my friend, indeed we are connected. I am SO glad this post meant something to you… that means a whole lot to me. Thank you for taking the time to comment!

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  2. A great way of looking at it! I have used a 'mountain" analogy before - the death presents a great mountain in front of us and we have a shovel. Each person who helps us comes along with their own shovel and takes a chunk out of our mountain of pain. We wish we had a bulldozer to make it all go at once, but it slowly goes, one shovel full at a time, thankfully with many shovels working it's not such a big task all by yourself. Thanks for the blog.

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    1. I love your analogy too - i hadn't quite thought of the idea of people taking chunks out that way! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, that one will stick with me. =)

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    2. Wow .... I am struggling with the pain of losing a beautiful son-in-law to suicide just over two years ago, leaving my daughter with an 11 month old son. The pain has been unprecedented. Deep beyond words, daily, and with tendrils that reach into unexpected corners of my life. I love what you shared Sarah ... My husband is not my daughter's dad and he doesn't understand how it can have affected me so deeply, so I can't talk to him about it, but it's like I have a stone in my heart which will not shift. I also like the mountain analogy, in fact God showed a picture yesterday of a mountain and I was at the bottom of it weeping (which I do a lot of at the moment) as I wept my tears melted the bottom of the mountain and it began to sink, and behind was a beautiful sunny countryside! I don't feel so bad about crying over it now I was holding the tears in because of my husband's reaction .... But now I don't feel so bad about it .... I will just do my grieving away from him! Thank you for sharing ...it is very encouraging.

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  3. Wish I could learn to do that. I cringe every time someone asks me how many children I have. I don't know how to answer the question. I can't find it within myself to answer one living and one who died. I just hate having the "one who died" conversation with people I don't know well. It hurts me to see the look of shock that crosses their face when I say it. So, I usually just say "one" and then sometime in the future when I know them better I mention the other child who has died.

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    1. Marla I completely understand. There are still times people ask if i am married and I just said "yes" and nothing more, to avoid it entirely. It's *kind of* a lie technically… lol, but oh well. I do not ALWAYS share so openly - and it is less as time goes on - but i do keep trying.

      I am so grateful you shared about your daughter with me, even if it didn't happen the first time we met. I felt like it gave us a deeper connection. I'm certain it gave you something to share that with me - but it also gave me a lot too. I want you to know that I felt so honored that you felt safe enough to share that with me. Truly. Thank you for your courage!

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  4. Beautifully written. Exact in how I feel and what i went through. It's all about turning pain to love, the only way to get through it. Thank you for pouring out your heart. Now I feel love. It's a beautiful thing

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