Day 931- Stairway to Heaven
These last few days/weeks have been rough. It’s January 10th. Darkness, cold, gray days, business struggles, it’s all weighing heavily on me. I’m involved in two therapies at once. One of the therapies involves a lot of visualization of the past, the day I found Shayna’s body in particular and visualization of the future. asking me to visualize what I’m going to miss with Shayna. Given that it’s the year that would be her senior year in high school, I think of the image of me taking her to OSU, to start school at my alma mater. I’m not sure how much this therapy is helping as it’s pulling me into the past as well as into the future when I’ve been struggling to live in the now. I’m going forward with it to see where it goes.
After Shayna’s passing, I thought of my happiness as being in the past and I had an intense longing to go there. Of course, my rational mind knew I couldn’t actually turn back the clock, but I spent a lot of time fantasizing about doing just that. Thinking about the future was not something I wanted to do, unless it was the distant (distant being relative) future when I will finally be reunited with her again. Every day between here and there was just another obstacle to hurdle over in that race to the finish line. This, I thought, was to be my lot in life- to just survive and endure as long as necessary.
As the days turned to weeks, the weeks to months, and the months now to years, I’ve been doing better with dealing with the “now”. I’ve come to the conclusion that as long as I have to be here, I might as well make the best of it. It’s just as well to be happy in the now as it is to be miserable. The days will go by just the same either way. So, slowly, the color has been coming back to life and I’ve given myself permission to feel again. Winter’s inevitable blues aside, there has been slow progress.
The other therapy I’ve been doing is some energy healing work. That I have found to be helpful. The last couple of weeks have been particularly anxiety ridden. The depression has been overwhelming to the point where I’ve felt like just giving up. Nothing I do seems to be working and I’m tired of trying new things. But, the session I had two days ago really seemed to help. I got an energy infusion. While nothing objectively has changed, I’m ready to keep on trying. It’s been so cold I actually missed a couple of days of my 7 mile hike. That, and my lower back has been telling me to take a break. Today, it was gray, but I got out and it felt good to be on the road again.
Just yesterday, one of the mothers in our group posted that her daughter’s first angelversary is coming up. This is a mother I met through a podcast interview. Her story is amazing, her spirit really drew me in, so much so that I asked her to join our group because she is such a bright light. What I’ve realized though is as a Shining Light Parent, no matter how brightly we shine, we all still struggle. She asked how she would make it through this first angelversary even with all the miraculous signs she’s had and the connection she still shares with her daughter. i shared with her what I could in terms of words of encouragement. As I woke up this morning, I got this image of us parents whose kids have crossed before us surviving these days without their physical presence. People think it’s wrong to long for death, to look forward to our “demise”. What people who haven’t lost a chid cannot understand is that it’s not so much looking forward to death as longing to be with our children. Not too many things in life are universal, but the longing of parent to be with their child pretty much is. So when they “die”, we would still do anything to be with them. Time is our enemy as it’s time that keeps us apart. The image I got was of the days going by. This mother is coming up on 365. I’m at 931. Instead of looking at the days as obstacles, I got the image of them being like building blocks or stairs. As we accumulate the days, we are building a stairway. Led Zeppelin sang of the lady who is buying a stairway to heaven. We are building a stairway to heaven and with each passing day, we construct another step. One day at a time, one step at a time, we are ascending.
