In the last post I referred to a question I was asking myself. The decision has been made. I will continue commenting on selected stories about the immense changes our world is undergoing while paying primary attention to my own evolving process. Above and below. Without and within. External/internal. Both/and.
With this in mind, I just created a new page, The Grieving Time — where all posts that relate to my own process of loss and transformation are and will continue to be archived as a series, chronologically.
On The Grieving Time page I reference three distinct periods:
1. 2003: The loss of my husband, as detailed in This Vast Being: A Voyage through Grief and Exaltation (2007).
“I remain astonished at how grief and joy can simultaneously occupy the same space. And that as grief widens and deepens, so does joy. And how the embrace of both triggers an even more intense aliveness.”
2. July 2010: Five blog posts relating to the sudden death of my four-year-old puppy Emma. From “With Emma’s passing, my suffering is her blessing”:
“Given the sweet, well-meaning efforts of first, my sister, and now my father, to lessen or hasten, or bury my admitted suffering, I am reminded of how difficult it is for us in this madcap society to sink below the restless, grasping mind, and stay there, floating in the ocean of feeling, its waves rising and falling and rising and falling again. Simply, I must do this until done. I must complete this round of attachment, this cycle of communion with one exquisite little white dog, with all the grief and gratitude that is in me.”
3. June, July, August/September 2012 and beyond: This summer’s ongoing loss of our 96-year-old Dad. From: Our father, Bernard L. Kreilkamp, finally let go of his suffering body
“After a mighty battle with the finality of his life here on earth in an increasingly poisoned and edemic dense body — just a month ago he exclaimed, full of himself after an exceedingly rare full night’s sleep, “I might just beat this disease after all!” — he had kidney disease, and was at that point operating on about 5% kidney function — he finally, after a scary and tremendously debilitating and anxiety-ridden three nights of no sleep at all because of continuous “air hunger” — agreed to allow morphine into his system.”
And probably sooner, rather than later, our 94-year-old Mom, shown here, with her youngest daughter Kristin, in a recent photo taken by granddaughter Meg.
From Post-Loss: Addressing failure to thrive, or war is hell.
“We always assumed that she would go first. That he would then enjoy the blessed solitude that his sensitive Pisces nature craved, and instead swerved into the life of an old-fashioned doctor who made housecalls after dinner and then returned to eight fractious children and a devoted wife.
“We always wondered: ommigod, what would happen if Dad goes first? How would Mom cope, she who had never been alone except during the war?
“And then he did go first.”
