When George first died, I was mostly sad for him, mostly sad for Nova.  I was angry at him too, I remember (an irrational displacement of anger), but mostly, I was sad because he would never get to hold his little girl, revel in the family he created, bask in our love.  He was so excited and proud to be a father.  And it was snatched away from him in his last moments of joyful anticipation.

I was sad for Nova just the same.  She would never get to meet the amazing man that created her, she would grow up without a father, she would not be as joyful and sparkly and happy without him in her life.  He would be just a story to her.  He would never be the warm cozy body, the soft kisses, the playful man to chase her and tickle her and throw her over his shoulder.  She had been robbed of one-half of her life before she was born.  And the fun half, too.

Now, I am sad for me.  A year later, my heart cries and my mind rambles on about how much I miss George, how I (still !!) can't believe he's gone, how I lost my perfect charmed life and all the questions I have about what happens next.  To me.  On the one hand, I am totally self-absorbed.  Me me me me me, this thing happened to me, and nobody else but me (not true, I know, but it feels distinctively lonely in here).  My egotism makes me sick, and I don't know how to turn it off.  

On the other hand, George, who was once the beneficiary of my sadness, has himself moved on.  He has moved on like everyone else.  He is at peace, he has accepted our fate, he is no longer attached to this life or his body or his merely mortal dreams.  He even told me, two months ago, that this was part of a greater plan that he and I (he and I!) had devised and signed off on many lifetimes ago.  I listened for a bit, then told him to hush.  I am still grieving, can't you see?  I am not ready to embrace this as our quest for infinite eternal love.   Thank you, but can you please come back later?  
I am no longer sad for George.

And I am no longer sad for Nova, because look how happy she is!  She got George's happy genes, and I inherited his goofy antics and sound effects and I've learned to make her laugh.  She is not sad.  She has George in a way that nobody else does.

But me, I am still me, and I am still sad, and I have not fully accepted that this is how things are supposed to be.  I still mourn my dead husband.  I still dream of what could have been.  I still torture myself with thoughts of his warm body next to mine, his eyes pouring all this love into me, so vivid and so real I want to die, knowing it is just one heart's beat out of reach.

​Maybe it is time to call George back.  Maybe I've taken this grief to the end, and it's time to make some magic happen.

A few days after George’s death the Medical Examiner’s Office called to tell us that no cause of death could be determined from the autopsy.  They had opened up his entire body, examined it piece by piece, and found everything in perfect order.  There were no occluded blood vessels, so heart attack was ruled out.  There was no internal bleeding, so stroke and aneurysm were ruled out.  There were no signs of trauma, so he didn’t die from hitting the parked car.  His heart.  Just.  Stopped.  Beating.  Just stopped.  They couldn’t tell me why.  How does a healthy man’s 38-year old heart just decide to stop beating one day?  And not just any healthy man, but George.  That was my heart, that was Nova’s heart.  How could there be no explanation?

The thought of George on an examining table, a scalpel slicing neatly through his scalp and frontal midline, his brain and heart and vital organs being removed and held and examined, is horrifying.  It is the most horrifying horror story I can think of.  I have to keep reminding myself that he was dead.  He felt nothing.  But what if he did?  And they didn’t even find anything.  All those horrifying images I now have to live with, and we are no closer to understanding why he dropped dead one day.  It was a Tuesday when he died.  That’s all we know.  

They sent blood and tissue samples to the lab for further testing.  Nothing could be concluded by the naked eye, but perhaps the lab results would provide some answers.  They wrote “Pending” on his death certificate, and told us it could be awhile before the final report was complete.  It took nine months for them to finish that report.  And the labs were inconclusive.  In the end, they assigned “Lethal Cardiac Arrhythmia” as the cause of death, based on no other probable conclusion.  I suppose it was accurate, his heart did stop, he did have an arrhythmia.  But why?

My mind was consumed by all the existential questions.  What is the purpose of George’s death?  What does this mean for him, for me, for Nova?  Why us?  Why was I chosen to go through this?  Why was he chosen to die?  The answer that came to me was both comforting and infuriating:  

George is needed somewhere else.  He has been chosen to do higher work on a higher plane, work that he could not have accomplished in this life, in his body.  You have been chosen because there are things you need to do in this life that will be informed by this experience, and you are strong enough to handle it.  And in the end, it is all about Nova.  She is at the center of it all, for reasons that will not be revealed to you for some time.

Even in my darkest hour, I am being told to believe that everything has a reason that is purposeful and good?  That is so fucking infuriating.  

At the same time, it was comforting to know that something greater than me was at work.  That I couldn’t have done anything to save George from dying.  That everything had happened exactly as it needed to happen, and that no amount of wondering “what if” would change anything.

I was somewhat surprised by my spiritual conviction around something so personally tragic, this inner voice that was spewing intangible esoteric stories about why my life was ruined.  Because no matter what beliefs I’d had about life, death, soul, and non-physical realities, this was now happening to me, and my belief system should have been shattered.  I tried to argue the voice of “this is not fair and there is no good reason for this and I am a victim and I will never be happy again,” but it did not stick.  Nothing made sense to my human mind, but something within me understood that what was happening to us was sacred.  That although this was not at all what I wanted nor expected from my life, it was part of a larger plan, and I needed to trust the Universe.  

But knowing this did not lessen the pain.  The pain was excruciating, and I couldn’t fathom a life without George.  I did not want this reality, no matter what that voice said.  I resisted it with every bone in my body.

I am posting two journal entries, one from 8/11/4, and one from 5/7/15, written nine months apart.  It's interesting for me to see the progression, the differences, the similarities.  And it's important to note that grief is in no way linear.  I bounce from one spectrum to the other, from resistance to surrender and everything in between, quite often.  But as I move forward, I find that the extremes are less so, and I try not to push anything away.  I try not to resist the resistance -- the sadness, the anger, the fear -- as much as I want to hang onto the acceptance, the love, the gratitude.  I try not to attach to any emotion or story and let it all be.  It can be excruciating, and utterly exhausting, but this is the way through.  As Rumi wrote, "The wound is the place where the Light enters you."

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August 11, 2014.  Monday.

Last night I cried.  Hard.  I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw my sad, sad face, and cried and cried.  I needed to see it, my sad ugly face.  I needed to see the pain I was in, to feel it deeply, to let it sink in just a little bit more.  I found a video of George from before I knew him, at his pirate birthday.  He looked so sweet and young and beautiful… and it broke my heart.  I asked for him to come into my dreams last night, and he did… I only remember I was sitting across from him and he was talking, and I was trying to pay close attention to the way his mouth moved.  For some reason, ever since he died, I’ve had trouble remembering him vividly.  As if I’ve erased all the details of his face from my memory, and can only experience him as a feeling now.  It’s kind of driving me crazy.

This morning I cried more.  God damn, I miss him and cannot believe he’s gone.  I don’t want this!!!!!!!  I want to go back in time, I want to see him, I want to rewrite the last 3 weeks.  It’s been 3 weeks since things were normal.  3 weeks since he worked from home, and we walked down to Miss Saigon for pho at lunchtime, and went to Park Burger for dinner that night.  3 weeks since I went to bed and (eventually) my love crawled in next to me.  3 weeks since he wore that green lion/lemon shirt that I will never wash.  

Oh my goodness.  I am beyond heartbroken.  
I am so fucking sad.  
This cannot be real life.
My life was so, so, so good.  I knew I had it all.  And now, I feel so empty, so lost, so without.
My love is dead.

George, my love, my light, you will always be my one true love.
I don’t want to say goodbye.  Ever.
Do I have to?
You are supposed to be everywhere.  But I only know you by your face, your shining eyes, your smile, your warmth.  This spirit thing is so hard to grasp.
I need you.  To hold me.  To comfort me.
Show me you are here.  Show me you still love me.  I am questioning everything.

Was it real?  Were we real?  Am I real?
Why did you love me?
Did I love you well enough?
Did you truly know how much I adored you?

You say we are doing this together from different places, but I feel I need you here, with me, in the same place.  
I know I do not have that choice.
It is so, so heartbreaking.
Love stories are not supposed to end this way.

You say our love story is not over.  
It is transformed, it is growing, it is becoming something greater.  Greater than all of us.
I say I need your arms to hold me, your lips to kiss me, your voice to say “I Love You”.
But your arms, your lips, your voice… are ashes now.  Burned like everything impermanent. 
How will you show your love… How should I show mine… How do we navigate this new love story… ?

I don’t know how to do this.
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May 7, 2015.  Thursday.
There is a tiny beacon of light, some inner understanding or soul wisdom, peeking through the darkness that helps me to see that George's death is not the end of anything, but just a part of our never-ending story.  In some ways, this is the beginning, we are still at the beginning; we still have so much to learn and discover together, so much joy to share through our hearts and minds and souls, so much to share through Nova.  George to this day does not feel dead, and it's because he is not dead.  His body is no longer the vessel with which he experiences the world, or with which I experience him.  But he is so, so alive.  So alive in everything I experience, so present in me.  In fact, he is more present in me than he has ever been.  He is always with me, and not merely as a thought, but as the force with which I move through the world, the arms of my heart embracing this life, the legs of my soul leading me forward to become my highest self.  He is, as he has always been, my Teacher.  He is immortal.  He can no longer be physically separated from me.  He is my strength and my power, my light and my love. 

He is not Dead, and I will no longer say that he died.  What do I say then?  He.... passed on?  ....transitioned?  ...became one with the beat of the Universe and is helping me become more beautiful and more amazing than I ever imagined I could be?  Truly.  You are making me into one incredible human, George III.  You are doing this with me, and together we are an incredible team, as always and even more so than before.  Wow.  Epiphany.  The tiny light just became Huge.

We used to look at each other and laugh like silly kids at how ridiculous our life was, our love, our bodies together, our deep satisfaction and contentment with each other, our wonder that we had found the thing, the treasure, the gold, that we never thought we would find.  We would recognize that it was hard to tell other people about our love without feeling shy because we had so much of what others only wanted to experience a little of.  We knew how fortunate we were. 

And the Truth is that we are still so fortunate, we still have our love, we still have the treasure.  It is not in the past, it is now; it is always.  We are One.  I am our vessel now.  Nova is our vessel.  We have not lost, rather we are constantly gaining.  We are a love that is more powerful and pure than ever before.  It is without pretense or expectation, without requirements or boundaries.  This is the love of a lifetime.  Beyond the lifetime.  The universal, eternal, infinite love.
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