Last month, I turned one.  

One year of being without my love, one year of being a mama, one year of grieving and wondering and crying and surrendering.  

One year of becoming.  Of being.  Of grasping and letting go and grasping again.  And of not knowing and sometimes not caring what tomorrow brings.  

One year of surviving.  Sometimes, gracefully.  Sometimes, fumbling madly in the dark. 

One year of holding onto the belief that the departure of the man I wished to spend the rest of my life with, was perfect in the eyes of the holy universe.  One year of cursing that belief, and of embracing it again.  

​It's been one year.  A whole year, and only a year.

Time is a tricky and illusory thing when you’re grieving.  It is painfully slow, and it is fearfully fast.  You want it to stop so you can catch your breath and get your bearings, and you want it to move so you can breeze past all the pain and sadness and anger, and wake up in a new life where everything is bright again.  And mostly, you want to go backwards.  You want to rewind to the time just before everything fell apart, that moment in which you maybe could have changed the way it all turned out.  Or you want to go back to that fine sunny day when you played hooky and spent the whole day in bed and snuggled with your love and cared nothing about the world outside, and you want to freeze that day in time.  

But you have to talk yourself off that ledge.  You could live the rest of your life in the past.  Replaying and re-examining how beautiful things were and how you could have made them better and all the things you wished you’d said a hundred times more than you said them.  If you believe that the life you thought you would have is the only life you were meant to have, then you will probably do this until the day you die.  

Don’t.  The life you thought you would have, you had.  It was perfect, and it was beautiful, and it was everything you wanted forever.  But forever is an illusion.  Nothing lasts forever, or even a fraction of that long.  Things last as long as they’re meant to last.  When they’re gone, they’re gone, and you bow to the ground and thank the stars for these incredible gifts, and you choose to continue your journey home.  That future did not belong to you.  And home is not always where we think it is.  

On July 22, 2015, I ended my year without George.  Nine days later, I celebrated our daughter’s first birthday.  For months leading up to that period I was consumed by sadness, anxiety, helplessness, and worry.  What would I do after the year passed?  Who would I become?  How was it that time kept moving forward when so much of my identity was steeped in the past?  

But after all the anticipation of those first anniversaries, I have found there is nothing to fear.  Instead of being forced to live further and further in the past, I have experienced an indelible shift in my being, my identity stripped once again -- first from wife to widow, and now from widow to warrior.  This new year, is a whole new year.  And thank goodness I don’t have to do that last year over again.  But look at what I am now, look at what I’ve journeyed through.  I’m starting to come out the other side.  I’ve been initiated.

Suddenly, with the passing of a year, I’ve been granted permission to experience life again.  I’ve begun attending social gatherings, chatting it up with strangers, saying “yes” to things that scare me, and opening the doors to my home and my heart.  It is frightening sometimes, opening to the world, my shiny new skin without armor or thickness, barely shed of those layers that once defined me as Me.  But as I emerge out of the widow womb and begin to interact with new people and experiences, I begin to discover myself again.  The intention behind that voice that was never quite as strong.  The vision through my heart that was never quite as clear.

There is an objectivity that comes from engaging with people outside of my emotional life, a reflection that is not based on a historical perspective of who I was, but one that is based on who I am, today.  These interactions are insightful and empowering, because as they experience me for the first time, I too experience me for the first time.  My identity as a woman, not as a widow, begins to take form.  Through this, I ask myself to remain vulnerable, to be naked, to allow this identity to be birthed in its raw natural state, without the mind interjecting its construct of what I should be, of what is right or wrong.  This is how I’m discovering who I am now, and I want to know the truth.  Thank you, humans everywhere, for helping me find it.  

​This is Life after George.  Joanne after George.  I am surprised to be here, and grateful, and excited, and humbled.  I bow to all the forces that have helped me along the way.  If you’re reading this, that’s you.  I love you.  Thank you.

In May I found George in the mountains of Colorado at Shambhala Mountain Center.  The moment I arrived I felt his presence clearly, and there was, for the first time, an overwhelming sense of peace and certainty about his departure, and even a sense of excitement for what we were about to embark on together.  It was clear to me then that our love story would live on to inspire others, that together we would show the world how to give and receive love with full participation, with full integrity, to not fear the end of it, to not fear its impermanence in this lifetime.  The truth is that everything in this life is impermanent, except for love.  Love never dies, even when people do or relationships end.  Love is passed on, it changes shape and form, and its actions and words and thoughts may evolve, but the love remains whole, if the love is true.  

The challenge we face is in the exercise of patience, in saving a space in our hearts for when that true love arrives.  We are often distracted by the people and things that represent an image of what we think we want from love and partnership, that allow us to check off an acceptable number of boxes on our list.  We may fail to truly feel into the heart connection, to fully understand how we would show up for this person if the things we loved about them one day disappeared or transformed into something unrecognizable.  

I knew I had found my love when I spent 10 days in silent meditation at a Buddhist temple in Thailand.  Images of George in a fire or a serious accident flashed across my mind, with his face severely burned and his body paralyzed and I knew that I wanted to be the one to love and hold him through the pain and torture of that experience.  I knew I wanted to have a child with him while watching him sleep one lazy morning, when I imagined him removed from this world, knowing I would be forever grateful to have a piece of him left behind with me.  It was George that I loved, not his carefree lifestyle, or his financial stability, or his friends and family, or even his gorgeous body.  I knew that even if all these things went away, even if the dreams I had of us living happily ever after did not come to fruition in the way that I hoped and expected them to, I would want to be by his side, loving him.  This was not a choice as much as it was a deep knowing, a realization that through his presence I had found my ground and my place in the world.

Not everyone has the fortune of experiencing this.  There is so much searching out there, to fill something in here.  In the quest to satisfy a hunger inside, to find our other half, to procreate and settle down and not have to keep searching for someone to grow old with, we become hopeful, and anxious, and sometimes, desparate.  Humans desire love more than anything in the world, and there is an unconscious tendency to grasp at the dream, the story, the slightest indication that the person standing before us is the one who will fulfill our dreams of love and companionship.  Positive attributes are glorified, and flaws are rationalized, until the object of our affection fits neatly into the multi-dimensional container that we’ve been carrying around with us; and we slip them into that space and celebrate the love we’ve found.  

When people and circumstances in life shift and evolve, as they always do, and our prize catch begins to change and grow in ways that no longer allow them to be held by us; or we change and grow and the space we carved out for them is now a different shape altogether; or tragedy falls and those things about them that formed the ground beneath us disappear -- like their health, or their money, or their happiness -- we are left with only our deep and abiding love for them, if it ever existed in the first place.  

But how do we keep ourselves open for the arrival of this love?  How do we patiently wait for that soul connection to find its way into our life, without succumbing to the myriad of other possibilities that pass us by day after day?  Or, if nothing is passing by, how do we keep ourselves from searching endlessly to fill the void, from attaching our longing to a mere warm body and a friendly smile?

We begin by filling the void, by recognizing that the greatest love we will ever experience is that which we have to our Self.  We do the work to look honestly and fearlessly at the relationship occurring within, tenderly and compassionately examining the qualities that make us beautiful and the qualities that cast a shadow on that light.  We choose to love and accept it all as it is today, while acknowledging that self-transformation has no end.  As we gently release the thoughts and patterns that no longer serve us, we humbly fall more deeply in love with who we are and have become, knowing that we are guiding ourselves one step closer to meeting the love and life partner we are destined for.

And then there is the practice of embracing vulnerability.  Of allowing our Self, which we have now been nourishing and cultivating with loving kindness, to be seen.  To go out into the world with no mask, no decoration, no sparkles, no jewels.  We let the sparkles come from our eyes and the jewels come from our voice.  We act and speak with a fierce authenticity and engage with others on a deeply personal level.  We bare all, knowing that even the parts we have yet to polish, even the parts we would like to discard, are beautiful because they are real; and because they form a wholeness that does not exist without both the dark and the light.  We invite others in to witness our truth, because that is the only way to be now, and the only way to connect with those who will help to nourish us from the outside.  

Through this practice of patience, self-love, self-examination, transformation, and vulnerability, we open ourselves up to experience love in its truest form.  Those who see us and understand us cannot help but be drawn near.  And when we are finally ready -- when we have found our completeness within on a mental, emotional and spiritual level -- we are united with the love we have been waiting for, the love that never dies, the infinite, eternal, magical love that we were brought here to find.  

I found this love once, will I find it again?  Could I be so fortunate as to experience yet another incredible love story in my lifetime?  
Yes, of course.  If I choose to live with an open heart, to be present to the life before me, to allow the departure of George to fuel my evolution and embrace the person I am becoming, then yes, I believe I will.  But first, I need to know who I am becoming.  My identity has been shaken and strewn, with certain core facets removed (wife, partner, best friend) and others added (mother, widow).  I am more open and vulnerable than I have ever been, but I stand here, naked, not knowing who or what I am supposed to be anymore.  I am in pieces, reconstructing myself, reconciling the life I wanted to have with George with the person who is no longer satisfied with what David Whyte calls, “a life of simple calculation.”*  I am still in the process of letting go of my past while figuring out how I want to show up in the world, with these new eyes, in this new future.  And it is the love that I have with George that powers me through all of this.  It is his daily presence in my heart’s center that carries me forward with trust and courage, knowing that our love is boundless, that he is cheering me on.  When I am ready for new love, he will tell me.  He will show me.  I will not have to look far.


* From "Solace", Consolations, by David Whyte.