I Want to Heal. I Don’t Want to Heal
I’m not even sure where to start with this post. The words are all jumbled up on my head as are my emotions and thoughts. I have noticed lately that I might be starting to heal. Last week a friend who is a spiritual healer volunteered to put me into a group where energy healers in Australia focused on a group of us for healing. That was extremely gracious of her, but I found myself with a strange thought when she said on Monday that I should be feeling a little better by now. I was feeling better. But, I wasn’t sure I liked it.
After Shayna passed I saw no way forward. I didn’t know how I would keep living and I really didn’t want to. I thought the pain was just too much to take for months or years or decades. I purposely shut down my horizon of looking at the future to no more than a few days, maybe weeks at a time. But, as the months have progressed, my horizon has been inevitably, subconsciously and involuntarily, expanding. And, I think some healing has begun. Also involuntarily.
After I realized I could deal with the pain, even if for a long time, my next fear was not the pain, but actually a fear of healing. Healing is forgetting. Healing is letting Shayna be a thing of the past. Healing is moving on without her. I will always remember the moment at the hospital after they told us she was gone, we went back to see her body one more time. That turn of my body, putting my back to her and to taking those steps away from her, were the hardest steps I’ve ever had to take in my life. I felt like I was leaving my baby behind. It was full circle from the moment just 15 years earlier when I had taken her into my arms, when I carried her out of Good Samaritan Hospital and into my life.
I don’t want to heal. I don’t want to go on. I don’t want a “new normal”. I want to be the guy who rips his eyes from their sockets and goes to live in a cave for the rest of his life, covered in sackcloth and ashes. I want to go mad from the grief. I want to honor our love by not being able to live without her. Maybe that’s the real reason that after her death I could not imagine years without her. That is the real reason I want(ed) to die. Years might bring healing. Healing feels like dishonoring her. Healing feels like turning my back on her again. Healing hurts.
I think however, the healing may be inevitable. As I do what I have to do to cope so that I can be here for Ty and Kayla, it’s causing the healing. And maybe it’s just time that is bringing it. I don’t know. I can’t separate it out.
It just sucks all the way around. There is no turning back and I really don’t want to go forward. Not healing means dealing with almost unbearable pain for God only knows how long. Healing means maybe I don’t love her as much as I thought. Death is the only escape.
