Energy Force

Do you ever have those moments, where you can't really explain why or how, but you just know that the person you lost whom you loved most, is nearby, or in the room with you? It is more of a feeling really - rather than something that can be analyzed or broken down. Sometimes it is inside the gust of wind that whispers by on a cold, crisp autumn day. Other times it is hiding within the melody of a beautiful song, or in someone else's laugh or smile or voice. You hear them. You see them. You feel them. There is no need to question it's reality, because it just is. It exists inside of you, and all around you, surrounding you like air that only you can breathe in.

There are times when I am sitting somewhere, alone, and then I suddenly know and feel very strongly my husband's presence. A lot of times he will say something to me. Something specific, and something that only he would say. I will actually hear his voice, like a small soul in my eardrum, carrying me into the next minute or hour or day. There are other instances when I am confronted with pieces and fragments of my husband, inside of another person. Like when I met his sister for the first and only time, after he died, and I could see that her reddish skin on her arms and back was the same skin he had, and her ice blue ocean eyes were his blue eyes, looking at me sweetly once again.

This week I went to my weekly grief counseling session, and I was feeling extremely emotional and unstable somehow. I felt like at any given moment, I was going to collapse in the sadness of missing him, and when I walked into the room where she stood, holding the door open for me, I found myself asking and saying out loud to her: "Can I please have a hug?" This is not something I would normally say, as I am normally awkward and uncomfortable with too much intimacy, and I am not the hugging type. But it felt like the exact right moment to ask that, and it also felt like someone inside me, or the wind, was pushing me to ask the question. "Just ask her, Boo", I heard him say. "It's okay." So I did. Her response was an immediate: "Of course you can have a hug", and then she hugged me. And in that tiny moment, her arms became his arms, and her warmth became his, and I sobbed and sobbed for the next 90 minutes or so as I shared with her all of the feelings that sat inside me, releasing them out into the sky.

She hugged me. And he hugged me too. It was poetic, and beautiful, and so very necessary. Something was in the air that day. It was him. He was there, which is not the same as him being here. Here. But it is still incredibly special. I sort of picture my husband as floating around in the universe somewhere - everywhere. His energy spots me, and becomes my shadow, trailing behind in an invisible path, waiting until it is safe to hug me.