Where We're Going

He died on a Tuesday. I can still remember screaming those animal sounds into the phone, tones I'd never heard come out of myself. Deep, guttural defiances... yelled at his dad on the other end of the line – every cell of me rejecting the words from his broken voice, “No baby, he's not okay...” The room is spinning. I remember flashes only. I remember pacing like a caged animal in the shock of it all, and coming back to the bedside where I stared at one of those old-timey pictures of us on the wall, in a teal frame, which I'd hung only days earlier. Suddenly, I am in the hallway, down on my knees, screaming still. Then on the floor, in the bedroom, calling my best friends, the first words I say, over & over, “You have to come over. You HAVE to come over!” followed by barely breathing words, “It's Drew. He was in a crash...... he... didn't make it...” I am lost in space. Gasping. Grasping at anything I can, but nothing exists. I am plummeting through an empty black void – a vast nothing. It is somewhere not earthly. In the explosive event of his death, I have left my body too. It is 8pm, June 12, 2012. I am 29 years old. And the love of my life, my future husband, is dead.

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It was a helicopter crash. He was working his first big contract up in Washington state doing agricultural flying. He was supposed to be gone for 3 months, but in the first week, while riding along with another pilot to scout out the job, the pilot hit a power line and they went down into a tree. Drew was killed almost instantly from a severe blow to the chest. I don't have to tell all of you how terrifying and disorienting those first weeks were… how lost I was. 

In the weeks before he died, we talked excitedly about the future and about getting married. I found the ring just a week before the crash and I later found out... he was planning to propose to me as soon as he returned from his trip. Although he never had the chance to propose, one night on the phone that week, he said to me, “what if I were to ask you soon?” I did the usual ruining-of-the-moment by trying to be logical about planning and coordinating... and then I stopped myself, and said with all the love in my heart and a big smile, “Whenever you ask me, I will say yes.” I  could hear his smile all the way from Washington to Texas, it was that big. That is why, although we never got to the true proposal, I will refer to him as my fiancé.

For a month I stayed with his family near Austin. I tried to go back home to Dallas,  go back to work and routine. I made it only 4 days. Routine wasn't helping me like people said it would. I was already unhappy at my job and could not see how I could ever deal with that on top of all my grief. I had friends, but no family in Dallas. I knew in my heart that staying wasn't right for me. I could feel him telling me to leave Dallas... not to run away from it, but to run towards what I needed, family. 

This was not my first run-in with death. I lost my Mom to breast cancer when I was nine, and my Dad to heart disease when I was 27. Being without my parents at such a young age has influenced and colored every aspect of my life and who I am. With my siblings also living far away, I'd become part of Drew's family pretty fast. So after he died - when they told me to come and stay with them at their ranch near Austin - it was a no brainer for me.

Within 3 months of his death, I quit my job, rallied all my incredible friends in Dallas to help me pack everything into boxes and get it into storage, piled my two cats and a carload of essentials into my hatchback and left Dallas in the dust. I got a part time job at an art gallery in Austin, which was something I'd always wanted to do. It was easy work that surrounded me with creativity and art and amazing people. It helped.

In the rest of my time, I did a lot of what I did when I lost my parents… I made art. Hiked around in the countryside, wrote endlessly, took a lot of photos, sat and stared quietly sometimes for hours at the hills and trees. I started painting for the first time in my life, and found it helped me to express some of the pain. I started selling some of my art here and there and showing it at a few galleries and shows. I started my Our 1000 Days blog to record my journey and our story. I listened to all kinds of music from classical to heavy metal, and took some art classes like welding and clay sculpting and jewelry-making. I went to a lot of art galleries and festivals just to be around art. I found that exposing myself to new things - whether appreciating art or watching documentaries or making things in a class - helped to give me a break from the emotions and helped me find some way to still see the wonder in the world. Sometimes, like with painting, it also ended up being a way to get some really deep emotions out. Art in all its forms has saved my life.

I don't know why I decided to change everything after he died, except to say that for me, that life died and I no longer had any desire to try and continue it. I wanted his death to change everything. I wanted it to propel me off into some completely alternate direction, some big great unknown. I wanted it to help me take the chances I never took, and try the things I never tried. I wanted his death to alter me beautifully and exactly as much as his life did. I realize this may not be the usual way people deal with this sort of thing, but I guess it is just my way of making some meaning from it all.

- - -

This pretty much brings us up to now. The gallery I've been working at is closing in just a few weeks, so right as I am beginning to write to you, there is another part of this journey that is ending. It's pretty scary, as that had become some part of my new normal… and other than doing some design work for my mother-in-law (although I am not formally their daughter-in-law, it's just easier for us all to refer to each other this way now, and so we do), I really have no steady income and no concrete idea where my life is going to go from here. It's all wide open.

But I have some ideas. Before he died I had only dreams of being a writer and an artist and making a different in people's lives with my creativity. Since he died, I have dropped everything to pursue those dreams (albeit at a snails pace, because I'm also dealing with the grief). I have sold some of my art, written many pieces that I am very proud of, and gained a great deal of confident in myself as an artist and someone who can help people. That's a big thing for me to admit… because honestly, deep down, there is still a part of me that doesn't believe I am big enough to ever help anyone. But slowly the part of me that knows I can is gaining momentum.

I have no clue how anything will unfold in the next year or two or ten. All I know is that I've lost my mother, my father, and the love of my life, all before the age of 30. I've been dealing with death and grief and learning to live through it for over 20 years already, and I'm only 31. I'd have to be a complete idiot not to take that as a sign to help others out somehow. So I'm setting my compass there and letting go, trusting that someone out there - perhaps a particularly handsome pilot I know - will be guiding me.

The "A" Word: Acceptance

Amanda is turning in grades this week in Australia (teachers work so much more than we know behind the scenes!)...so she has asked me to write for her this Tuesday. Looking through the archives, I found this blog I wrote about the concept of acceptance, and thought I would share it again today. As you all know, acceptance is the final of the stages of grief. Well, I guess it would be the last stage if the stages were indeed linear...but that is a whole different post! Here is my idea, written two years ago, about how I found peace with the "A" word....and since Phil and I would have been married twelve years on June 16th, I thought a photo taken on our wedding day would be the perfect image for this post. Long live love.

Since Phil's death, grief has created a long struggle between the desire to overcome daily challenges and the need to accept the realities that widowhood has brought into my life. The concept of acceptance when applied to Phil's death was not okay with me. Somehow I felt that accepting Phil's death was a horrible combination of giving up and giving in to the pressure I felt to be "better." The way people said the word always sounded so FINAL to me. So, instead of heading toward the horrifying land of acceptance...I stubbornly planned around any roadblock that would slow what I thought was forward life progress, but I trudged forward with no clear destination. I think I believed that if I kept moving I could outrun the need to accept the fact that the man I loved was not coming home.

One woman I met just a few months after Phil died shared this idea with me, and I have never forgotten her words. When she was surrounded by the pain of either loss or loneliness after the death of her husband, she would challenge herself to "rest in the riddle." She allowed herself to not know the answer; to sit in the stillness; and gave herself permission to not ask why, when, what or how. This was a foreign concept to my stubborn, planning, determined mind. I remember wondering HOW exactly she did that. Since resting would require being still, would acceptance sneak up on me unbidden while I wasn't busy doing? What I can see now, that was not so clear then, is that I was terrified of being frozen in grief. IF I stopped what would happen to me. Would the darkness swallow me up? Would accepting Phil's death mean he was forgotten? What would I have to let go of in order to meet the acceptance criteria?

I have struggled with this answer for five years, and it has taken me every bit of that time to find a path towards acceptance that didn't feel like giving up, or somehow failing Phil.

Eventually I embraced the concept that my life is a tapestry. By making my every relationship, word, effort, endeavor, friendship, challenge, and tragedy a part of my life work...nothing is ever left behind.

Accepting Phil into my life tapestry, and weaving a pattern with his love so beautiful that it becomes a piece of the whole that is noticeably more vibrant than many others gave acceptance a purpose. His love shines through my weaving, but only if I can allow him to become part of me instead of an idea outside of myself. That thought turned out to be a form of acceptance I could live with...and a worthy place for the kind of love Phil and I shared.

Every day we are faced with choices about what to add to our own piece of life art. Your loss will color the final product, but so will your love. The lost moments we so long for are often the smallest gestures, the quietest moments, the most unimportant seeming details...you are still creating those every day, and are slowly stitching them into your own personal tapestry. 

Stitch with flourish.

beginnings and endings

source

I am in the midst of reading a wonderful book called "The Color of Rain" by Micheal & Gina Spehn, which tells the story of how each lost their spouse and found hope and healing in each other. I am excited to read something that seems to parallel a lot of my own story, but it's also really neat to read because both of them are from the same town I live in, so it makes it even more personal and close to my heart. I even ran into Gina at Panera a few weeks ago in a weird twist of God's timing through a mutual friend. Very cool.

There is a quote from the book that I read yesterday about 5 times. Then, I underlined it. And re-read it. And made notes in the margins. Then I thought about it all day. Finally, I had to write it down. Gina was talking about the final days of her husband's terminal illness and the love that was developed through it:

"It was not physical or material. This love lacked inhibition and boundary. It was limitless and free of expectation or regret. It was effortless, all-encompassing love; given, received, and understood. I think it's rare in life to experience this kind of love. In any relationship it ebbs and flows, but once you've had it, you crave it like no lustful urge you've ever had. I was filled with it on my wedding day, and when I held my babies in my arms, and again when my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer. If only we had the ability to live life as thought it were so new or so close to the end that all we could do is give and show and become love. It seems that beginnings and endings teach us about this kind of love. It is in between that we tend to forget."

Okay, now go back and read it once more. Let it soak into your pours. Breathe it in deeply. Make it truth. Anyone who has had an experience like this knows the power in these words. It is what I have been trying to formulate words for and translate from my heart that I've been unable to do in the same way. But it could not be truer. When you lose something so precious, you crave to fill the space. You crave to feel something genuine, something authentic. Everything seems arbitrary up against something so important that you become frustrated with other people's pettiness. You lap up the moments that matter.

I am about to face another beginning - the beginning of my life with Steve. Facing this new adventure in my life brings me closer to that nostalgia of remembering what life is all about: love. So I'm more sentimental, I try to be more careful with my last words to people, I steal extra moments with people I love. And grief tends to keep you running along with the same theme and keeps it closer to you for longer. But that doesn't mean I don't fall into the 'in between' category every now and again. I catch myself doing it now and at the end of the day, I can recognize it in a way I couldn't before. And I start over every day. It's a pledge I made to myself and to Jeremy that this was the way that I would love from now on. My life is forever changed, so there's no way I can act like it isn't.

I needed to share this thought with the world today: Love fiercely.

Don't get stuck in the in between.