​It’s amazing to me how my mind still, after 15 months, does not understand that George is dead.  He is dead, Jo!  He died.  You saw him dead.  His body without a George inside.  

What is it about Death that is so hard for my mind to grasp?  Is this a human condition, a cultural ineptitude, or my own personal denial?  I do not know how to hold my life with George, and my life after George, in the same hand.  I do not know how to see George’s life, and his death, in the same view.  When one seems real, the other seems illusory.  ​

​But they both exist.  I need to understand this, and my mind does not know how.

Perhaps it is not for my mind to understand.  When I found myself closest to the truth, closest to making sense of it all, I was at Shambhala Mountain Center in the Colorado Rockies and it was not my mind that made the pen move, that brought those words and ideas and understanding into the light.  I simply began writing, not knowing what was going to fall on the page, not using my mind to make the words appear, but simply being present with the moment, allowing whatever needed to move through me, to come forth and be known.  

It was not my mind.  It was something transcendent.  Perhaps it was my soul.  Perhaps it was George’s soul.  Perhaps it was the clear, calm, knowing voice of the universal consciousness that descended upon my human form that evening.  And for a moment in time, I knew.  I understood.  It all made beautiful perfect glorious sense.  

        George is here.  He is not gone, he is not dead.  I miss his beautiful body, but I have so much more of him now.  He, in fact, is so much more than he was when he was alive.  He has evolved and become pure light.  He has become the great Teacher he was always meant to be.  His death was his evolution, and mine.  It was our evolution.  Our awakening.

        George and I have known each other for a very long time.  We have been in love before this lifetime, and we have been separated.  We fundamentally understand the dance between this human existence and the flight of the soul.  The death of his body, this separation we are experiencing, is simply part of the plan, part of our work.  We are helping each other discover the Truth.

There was more, but I’ll spare you, for now.  That voice stayed with me for several weeks.  

I began telling people about it, because it was so consuming that any other answer to the question, “How are you?” would have been inauthentic and pointless.  As I’d hear myself tell our story, my rational mind would judge me and tell me I sounded crazy and delusional.  But I couldn’t hold it in.  It was too powerful.  Simultaneously I experienced abdominal pain, nausea, hot flashes, dizziness, headaches.  It felt like I was having some sort of spiritual awakening.  

I realized that I could continue following this path of spiritual wonderment and embrace the glory of understanding the death of the body and the immortality of the soul and teach of love and its infinite gifts, and how we are not bound to experiencing love in only this human form, but how love continues on, how our relationships continue on, long after we are dead… and I saw myself diving into this intriguing new world, never to return.

But then I made a choice.  I returned to my human experience.  Because I had not yet allowed myself to grieve for George, and I had not yet fallen to pieces, and I had not yet cried my heart out.  I had only been coping with his absence, learning to be a mother, and trying to return to school and resume a life.  I had not yet had the time or space to feel the depths of sadness that come with losing the human being you valued above all others in this life.  

I asked George, and the universe, for some space.  To allow me to be human, to allow me to feel the pain.  I wanted to make sure I’d done it, so I could fully participate in whatever came next.  

So I went, and I grieved.  Then I came back, and asked for George to join me.  
George, I am ready for you now!  Let’s do this!
Silence.

George?  Hey, I’m ready to receive your teachings.  I’m ready to embark on our new relationship.  Please come.
Nothing.
Hmm.
George!!

Day after day, life continues and I plod along on my human experience.  I have big decisions to make about the year ahead, I have my child to care for, and things feel heavy.  This is the point, I think, when I am supposed to start moving forward.  But I can’t find George.  He, in his new enlightened form, is supposed to come with me.  We are supposed to be doing this together.  But right now, I only see him in my past, and I cannot bear to leave him there.

I have wondered if I should not have stepped away from him in the first place.  Why did I feel the need to interfere?  To have my human experience of pain and suffering?  How could that be more appealing?  

But that is what I did, and therefore it had to be done.  

​I know that George will come back to me when he feels I am ready for him.  I know I have not lost him, not really.  But maybe…  I’ll be more careful, the next time I ask for space.  And perhaps my mind will never be able to understand death.  But my soul knows.

I have been feeling scattered lately.  Unproductive.  Unmotivated.   Tired.  Frustrated.  How long is this grieving going to last?  How many times will it pummel me to the ground?  Suddenly I am down again.  My body and mind want to retreat.  I do not want to socialize or be in public.  I want to be left alone.  Last month, I was back out there in the world, embracing the people around me and enjoying new experiences.  Now, I am back in hiding.  And so it goes.  

And then I have an epiphany.  I have been blaming grief for all of these ups and downs, all this drama in my head.  But yesterday I was forced to look at something greater than grief as the cause for all this mental and emotional turmoil:  I was forced to look at Me.  This is what happens when you keep a journal for years on end.  You cannot deny your past, or who you were, or what you struggled with.  It is all there, in writing.  Your writing.  And it hits you right over the head.

Yesterday, in the midst of my restless desperation to find direction, to find answers, I picked up an old journal, one of many stacked on the shelf, not knowing the time period it reflected.  I opened it.

September 2011 - May 2012.  I had returned from my travel adventures that June, ready and excited to start a new life with George.  In October I began my studies in Chinese Medicine, finally going back to school to make the career change I had been dreaming about for years.  I had a whole new life, a new home, a new partner, a love I never imagined I would find.  I had everything I could have asked for, and more.  I was finally living the life I wanted, a life I had created.  And I knew this.  I wrote this.  Over, and over, and over.  I wanted so badly to feel the gratitude that I knew I should feel.

Yet the feelings of discontent, inner conflict, and restlessness jump from the page.  I was still searching for something.  I began exploring new possibilities in consciousness, and stillness, and states of awareness.  I experimented with food, and fasting, and alternate forms of nourishment.  I was striving to grow, to change, to elevate my spirit, to reach my human potential.  And I was struggling immensely.  Against myself, my environment, my lifestyle and my habits.  What I wanted on the inside and what influenced me on the outside were at such odds with each other that any attempt to enact conscious change eventually landed me back to square one.  I did not know how to reconcile it.  I wanted to go back to the temples of Southeast Asia, and back to the treetop bungalows, where life was simple and my mind was clear.  Instead I spent my free time socializing, in restaurants and bars and at parties, because this is what we did.  My relationship with alcohol reared its ugly head, again.  

Then slowly... the fierce need to get back to myself, to find my truth, dampened... and I stopped searching.  I settled in.  

I think I forget sometimes, or rather choose to ignore, the fact that I have a psychological attachment to alcohol that has been destructive since the day I started putting it into my body.  I have tried many times to stop, eventually coming to the conclusion that I am too attached to let it go entirely, that I can find a way to live in balance with it.  I no longer think this is true.  It's not that the quantity I drink is so destructive to my body, because I generally drink in moderation; but the mental attachment, the grasping, the association of alcohol to pleasure and escape, the crutch it provides when I am feeling overwhelmed, when life gets intense, and its ability to soften the edges yet keep me in a state of complacency when I am too afraid to move forward, to really change -- is killing me.  

After George died, I used alcohol to soothe the pain.  It helped, of course.  But it is a downward spiral, and I feel myself slipping away.  

Grief is hard.  I miss George immensely.  And I do not know how to reconcile his death.  But I realize now that there is more than grief at play, and this is not all about George.  If he were here, I might still be struggling, just as I did before.  This is a difficult fact to acknowledge, but an important one.  I cannot hide behind grief, and I cannot blame it for everything that I don't want to feel.  I have work to do on myself that has nothing to do with George, nothing to do with grief.  It is a journey that began when he was still alive, and one that somewhere along the way, I abandoned.

It is up to me now to want more, to resume my soul journey, reignite that spark, and find inspiration within myself to become the woman I was brought here to be, so that I can be of service to others.  It is time to dig deep.  To elevate.  To know that a life of happiness and fulfillment are only bound by the limitations I place on myself.    

​I have been waiting for this opportunity.  For the strength and the space to follow my path.  I am scared.  But I know I can get there.  My life, and my daughter's life, depend on it.