Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I went up the mountain Sunday with my friend J.  She and I worked on a little project together that culminated with our field trip.  We left behind a desert floor that was plenty hot, especially for October, and found ourselves in a shady grove of quaking aspen 40 degrees cooler, where long sleeves were a must.

I realized that I had not been up the mountain in just over 2 years, and the last time I went, it was with A at my side.  I was showing him the sights here, his first (and as it would turn out, his only) trip to the desert.  It was hot that day, but we were caught in a cold, torrential downpour of the kind you really don’t want to be driving in as we reached the top of the mountain.  Our destination was the Octoberfest they put on at the ski lodge.  As we got out of the car, it was foggy, cold, and the thunder was still rolling through the mountains.   Soggy dancers, looking deflated in once-fluffy skirts and sharp lederhosen, streamed out into the parking lot; they had been rained out.  We had a good time anyway, though we skipped the brats and sauerkraut and instead went on into town for pie.  One of my favorite pictures of him was taken that day, the one that graces "the shrine."  It seems prophetic now.  He is looking back at me over his shoulder, and behind (or ahead of him, if he’d kept walking) was a partly cloudy sky slowly clearing from the storm, the great blue beyond.  Was the future told in that picture?  Sometimes I think so.  Mostly I think he was one hell of a sexy guy, and it was my good fortune that he preferred sleeveless shirts.

It’s hard to believe I haven’t been up in 2 years.  But when I think about it, I realize that the last 15 months have kind of been a wash.  They have slipped away faster than I can comprehend, and yet I feel like he’s been gone forever too long.  Both are true.

There was a point in my grief where I stopped hating every day that passed because it brought me further away from our life together, and took an initially bitter comfort in the fact that every day that passed would bring me closer to him again.  I certainly wasn’t getting any younger.  But I am also not in a hurry.  My time will come when it does; that much I know.  I know that, barring my own stupidity, I have no control over that.

I no longer have a grip on time, if I ever did.  There is eternity in every moment, and years are a blur as they pass, and I often wonder if that is a more accurate view of the whole “time” concept than I’ve ever had before.  Who is to say?  I read books that tell me that time does not exist on the other side; it only exists here in the material world.  That would be cool, but I cannot believe it just because someone says it.  But I want to.  I want to believe that when I get there, it will feel like no time has passed, and we just spoke yesterday.

Anyway, despite my realization of the last time I was there, it was a good day.  J doesn’t seem to mind that I talk about A, and when I apologized for not stringing 3 sentences together without mentioning him at least once, she said it seemed normal to her.  I am blessed to have such an understanding friend; there are few such in my life.  She, too, knows grief, and too much of it in recent years.  It has made her vast heart even more compassionate.

The weather was beautiful, the trees were gorgeous, the mountains grand and inspiring, and we both exclaimed once again that we could not believe we lived in such a beautiful place.  We sat in the woods and ate cookies and drank hot spiced cider and talked like the old friends we are, and I felt fortunate.  Fortunate to have such a dear friend.  Fortunate to sit on the gold-strewn forest floor, only the sound of the wind in the leaves breaking in upon our quiet visit.  Fortunate to feel the sun on my face.  Fortunate to live half an hour downhill from this idyll, and to have the wheels to get us there.  Fortunate to actually feel fortunate again, when for so long I felt cursed.

Miracles happen every day.