After the storm

"there will come a time you'll see with no more tears
And love will not break your heart but dismiss your fears
Get over your hill and see what you find there
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair"

It's an old song by Mumford and Sons called After the Storm. It is fucking brilliant, it is about life and death. I sent this to my daughter after she lost George, confident she would find life again and rise above her pain and anguish. It has been a favorite song of mine for a long time now. It's hopeful because it talks about the pain and darkness we can overcome. A time when we can live again with beauty in our lives. I believed it for her. Sometimes I believe it for me. When I get glimmers, like love from my friends and insight in our discussions. Recently I noticed out of the corner of my eye this basket on my balcony. I had bought this last year and it had flowers (not these ones) in it and in the winter when they all died I had ripped out the dead tendrils leaving only the dirt. And lo and behold up comes these beautiful petunias this summer, out of the dirt. A new different flower. It reminded me of resilience and of this song. It seemed like a message to me, like I too would bloom again out of this nothingness I am currently experiencing. In my life right now I am at a place where I am nowhere. It is very uncomfortable, I don't like it, I don't want to embrace it. I can't run from it anymore.  I have nowhere to go.

"I won't die alone and be left here
Well I guess I'll just go home,
Oh God knows where
Because death is just so full and man so small.
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before"

In the religion of my youth we called a place like this purgatory, or for babies not baptized, limbo.  You're not in heaven (with the one you love) and you're not in hell (the panicked grief immediately after the storm). You are in a holding pattern waiting. Except I have nothing to wait for. These allegories of my youth are just that, stories we tell each other to stay hooked into wishing for what once was or for what could be. I tend to believe they are metaphor for death anxiety. The time well after the storm, the lull or the emptiness that stretches out night after night, the unending loneliness, the empty flower pot. This is purgatory, this is my life in limbo.

"And after the storm
I run and run as rains come
And I look up, I look up.
on my knees and out of luck
I look up".

I am not looking up, I have nowhere to look, nowhere to go. I just am here. I am stuck in a guilt grief loop asking why. Why did we fall in love so deeply to have this happen? Why did our personality and our patterns or schema connect? They the engine of this train that took us to where we had to go. Him the caretaker, me the one who "didn't do sick well". Was it that nurturer in you that kept you silenced about what you were experiencing before it was too late? Could you not admit your ails because it would mean I would have to take care of you now? And me the taker, the selfish one, used to your ministrations, did I neglect to see something I should of sooner because I only knew you in your pattern and me in mine and wanted to keep us there? God dammit I would have risen to the occasion, I would have pulled out every connection, every trick in the book, I would have researched your treatment and administered it myself. Why was I not allowed to do that? Was it me? Was it you? Was it tragic? Yes. And I am left with the unanswered questions. Alone in a desert asking.

"And now I cling to what I knew
I saw exactly what was true
But oh no more.
That's why I hold,
That's why I hold with all I have.
That's why I hold".

After the storm, this impossible dank place of waiting. This barren dirt I sit in wondering. Will there come a time when I will get over this hill, when my flowers will bloom and I can put them in my hair and live again? I don't have the answers, I know nothing. I am in a holding pattern now. I have to learn to tend the garden and till the barren soil. Some days it is so hard, I want to run. I am scared of what's ahead. I am unfinished with what's behind, with the guilt that I know I need to till into the soil as well because from it will come my flowers. I hope. I hope.

"Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won't rot, I won't rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won't rot."