Facing Grief

I had a very long talk with a chaplain yesterday because I have been having a hard time emotionally lately. It has been difficult to maintain emotional equilibrium. I was surprised when our conversation came around to the fact that losing my nephew, David, was still bothering me so much. It has not been that long, and I have always been close to my nephews, so it shouldn’t have been surprising. However, the depth of emotion was a bit of a shock. My siblings’ children are as close as I will get to having children of my own. Of the four I have had the joy of knowing and loving, I have had to say goodbye to two of them already. Both were sudden and unexpected departures. 

As much as I want not to be hurting still from the loss of David, I had to realize and accept that the loss of this precious young man has been stalking me all year. I am angry that my current state of health robbed me of being able to see him more frequently at a time when I knew he was hurting and feeling a little lost himself because he went from having Ben’s two children in his and his father’s care to being an empty nester. I had talked to him about it at my house when he was there a few months prior to his passing. I wanted so much to be able to spend more time with him, but my lack of mobility has hindered me from going anywhere except the doctor.

After the loss of a loved one, life moves on, only a piece of the puzzle of our lives is missing. We can try to pretend that it isn’t missing, but it doesn’t change the fact that there is a gaping hole in our hearts where a person who once resided on this plane is no longer there. 

When we lost David’s twin, Ben, we were all forced to move on immediately. As soon as we got home from the family gathering after Ben’s funeral, we became aware that Hurricane Charley was barreling our way. We were jerked from grieving mode and thrown into survival mode instantly. 

When David died abruptly at the end of last year, it was like losing both of them all over again. The grief from the loss of Ben had been pushed aside in order to make sure my mom and my sister were going to be safe during and after the hurricane. I knew their hearts were broken and I tried to make sure that we were all going to be ready and as safe as possible when Charley came knocking at Mom’s door, where we were all three huddled together. I clearly recall standing next to my mom going through an emergency preparedness list that is permanently tattooed on my brain from spending so many years in earthquake country. After a careful inventory, Mom and I went off to buy bottled water since that was all we needed to be as ready as you can ever be for a hurricane. The quick shift from grief to survival mode grated on the heart, shredding it a bit because the shifting of gears was done without having time to use the clutch.

I am angry that my current state of health prevents me from driving to my mom’s house every other weekend to spend time with her. That is what I was doing from the moment I moved back to Florida in 2010 until I had to give up driving when I nearly crashed my buddy’s car because of back spasms that periodically rocked my body, forcing my right leg to go ramrod straight. That isn’t a big deal in normal situations, but it’s downright scary when you’re driving and the leg that loses control is the one pressing the gas pedal. 

I had to make a quick lane transfer to keep from ramming into a car that was stopped in front of me. I managed to make it safely back to Jan’s house with the help of a host of traffic angels. I went in, hung up the keys, and told Jan not to let me drive again until my back stopped causing my leg to do that. 

It’s been five years since the woman who drove across the continent a dozen times hung up her keys. When my Washington drivers license was nearing expiration, I got a Florida ID card instead. Thus ended my regular trips to visit my family. After moving 3500 miles back from Seattle so I could spend more time with my family, I had to ground myself. Since that time, my condition has made it nearly impossible for me to make the hour long trip even if someone else drives me.

Not being able to visit my mother at this time in her life is infuriating and another kind of loss and grief. Yet it isn’t something under my control right now. If will power and the desire to go were all I needed, I would be there with her already. I need my body to cooperate with me and heal so I can get around again on my own. 

The chaplain and I talked about how humbling it is to have to ask for help. Having to ask for the level of help I have needed for the past five years is downright humiliating. I know that I am a burden sometimes even though I’m told that I am not. I sense the anger and the frustration about having to worry that I am okay and not on the floor somewhere, and I understand it. It is difficult to have to be constantly aware of someone else’s safety. It’s stressful and I know it. It’s stressful and frustrating for me too. The loss of independence is yet another source of grief.

I have been very independent over the years. I moved across the country from central Florida to the Seattle area. Short of going on up to Alaska, something I considered doing when the Wasilla Waldenbooks store became available and was offered to me, I couldn’t have gotten farther away from the family nest. Ultimately I decided to stay in the more moderate Western Washington climate. Yes, i have had to ask for help at times in the past, but it has always been a last resort and an act of desperation after every other avenue had been explored. It has also been only for a short time rather than year after year of varying levels of dependence.

Yesterday I sought help from a chaplain because I knew I needed to talk to someone who was outside of the situation. I knew something was wrong and that I wasn’t figuring it out on my own. I’m so glad I did because it helped. Have my circumstances changed? No, but I think I can stop beating myself up for feeling so down. No matter how much we want grief to go away and leave us alone, it has its own time schedule. We may make ourselves busy and push through to survive the devastation, but that doesn’t mean that the waves of grief have washed us ashore to a new place in our lives, where we can stand and take those first faltering steps forward. Until that happens we can only try to keep the waves from overwhelming us. We must allow the waves of grief to wash over us until they subside into ripples in shallow water. Only then can we move on to a new place.

Why-not Wednesday

Today is Why-not Wednesday. Is that a thing? It is now. This is one of my (now deceased) LL Bean Adirondack lawn chairs. I used to sit outside in my chair and just be. Sitting in my chair outside was inspirational. I wrote many a poem from this seat. I watched the sometimes noisy, idyllic world act out its drama from this place. 

I came up with lots of good ideas while in this chair. Some have been carried out while others have fallen by the wayside. I was sitting by Hood Canal one night in one of my two identical chairs when I spotted a UFO and got the holy bejeebers scared out of me. I do NOT wish to repeat that experience even if it does make for a good late night scary story. I did a lot of good thinking, resting, chilling, sleeping, listening, and writing while in this chair (or its twin). Now the chairs are gone. They rotted in the summer rain and heat of Florida when I was back in Washington during the summer of 2012, mostly chilling back in my old stomping grounds on the Kitsap Peninsula. 

Even though the chair is no longer with us, what this chair represents is a time and a space carved out in the midst of the maelstrom of life where I let myself just BE. I didn’t have to prove anything. I didn’t have to produce anything, even though I did write a number of poems during my being time. I had a very demanding job when I first started using my chairs for quiet reflection in nature.

I was managing a rapidly growing Waldenbooks store in nearby Silverdale, Washington. I was in the process of creating my online bookstore, Bookshop Without Borders. I was working part time for my then publisher, learning the various aspects of book publishing. I created a syllabus for an independent study for a friend of mine, who was attending Evergreen College. I was actively practicing conscious living and being. 

Even just thinking about being in my chair is giving me some good ideas for creative projects. Let’s see where these ideas might take me. This is my first Whynot Wednesday and I am asking myself “ Why not?” Why not do something new? Something different. I am already doing that in a lot of areas in my life. What other things can I do? 

Do you have a place and time where you can ponder the big picture and ask unanswerable questions, listening quietly to see if anything comes back to you? If not, you might want to create such a place and start dreaming big dreams then asking yourself why not? You might be surprised by the responses you get. 

Duck, Duck, Goose!

(reprinted from my Mystic Angel Healing blog at http://www.mysticangelhealing.net/2018/03/duck-duck-goose.html)

Okay, so this blog should really be entitled "The Power of Music" or something like that. However, the title I gave it is more likely to get attention if only to see what kind of nonsense I'm up to today. This blog is about our feathered friends. It is a true story about a day I rode my bike to a nearby pond with a mini guitar I could carry easily on my back while I rode. When I arrived at my destination, I sat down next to the pond to relax and commune with nature for a bit. I didn't bring any food with me, and I had no agenda except to enjoy a pleasant day off work. What I didn't expect is that it would turn into an impromptu concert in the wild.

When I first sat down, I watched the ducks, geese, and a few swans paddling around the pond, as carefree as could be. They were no more interested in me that they were in the clouds drifting overhead in the blue sky. In a few seconds, all that would change. I pulled out my little guitar and starting playing and singing some of the songs I wrote long ago. I immediately noticed a change in the pond activity. All the waterfowl in the pond (and there were dozens of them), paddled over and formed an audience in a half circle in front of me. They stayed there until I stopped playing and singing after about a half hour. Then the crowd dispersed as suddenly as it gathered. All my feathered friends went about their business once again. I was in awe of the moment because it felt so holy. That's the only word I can find to describe it. It was so clear in that moment, that we were all one. We were all God's creatures. Every last one of us.

Although the birds didn't join in and sing with me (they didn't know the words, of course), they did enjoy the concert. I can honestly say that it was best concert I've ever given. None of my fans have ever sat in more rapt attention. They weren't listening to the words, since I doubt they spoke human, but for a time my music became a language we all shared--the ducks, the geese, the swans, and me.

Accidental Gardening Project

Here’s my new accidental gardening project. Not long after we moved into this house, I bought a big bag of raw sunflower 🌻 seeds to eat. I had gotten to eat maybe a handful of them before they mysteriously disappeared. I looked for them periodically, but never found them. A couple weeks ago, Beth found them on the top shelf of the pantry when she was looking for something else entirely. 

Now if you want to hide something from a person confined to a wheelchair, put it on the highest possible shelf and put something else in front of it. Voila! You’ve just made it disappear completely as far as that person is concerned. I can’t even see anything on the back part of the top shelves of the fridge or freezer. Forget the pantry.

Anyway, they were out of date and not smelling or tasting too fresh so I decided to toss them out to the birds, only I kept forgetting to do it. Finally I remembered one day and flung the entire bag out handful by handful until it was all gone. That night it started raining and didn’t stop for a few days. I felt sort of like I was back in Seattle, only it was about 20 degrees warmer. Unlike Seattle, the winter is our dry season so this nonstop rain in winter was quite the anomaly.

As you might have guessed already, that rain beat the seeds into the moist ground where they germinated and sprung up in patches all around the yard. Ahem. I hadn’t meant to do that, but there they were everywhere. I decided to let them grow a few days to establish a good root system. After a few more days, Beth got on our heavy duty scooter and went around the yard pulling up sunflowers by the handful. I then potted the best ones in some clay pots and hoped for the best. My first two pots struggled a bit the first couple days after the transplant before becoming more stabilized and looking as though they might make it. 

When Beth told her brother about it, he asked if I could start some plants for him to place in the garden he started in memory of his wife who just passed in November. Naomi loved sunflowers. 🌻I was thrilled to start a new pot for him, so Beth grabbed some more “volunteers “ from the yard and I planted them. No first day struggling or anything. They are already getting cozy in their new bed. 

The more I have thought about this whole series of coincidences, including the fact that the mowers hadn’t been here in a couple weeks, the more it feels like Naomi is working on the other side to put sunflowers in her garden at her home on this side of the veil. I’m delighted to be her hands on this side helping to make this happen. The more I work on my “accidental gardening project,” the more sure I am that there is nothing accidental about it. There is a design and purpose behind it. Of that I am certain. 

Naomi’s pot of sunflower 🌻 starts is the single one in the photo. I had already put my two pots together. I am really looking forward to seeing how this works out. I bet that pot produces the best sunflowers ever! 

I love you, Naomi! Thanks for letting me participate in this project for you and thanks for the kitty and butterfly quilt you picked out for Christmas for me before you left this world. It made me cry. It is precious to me.

Be the Helping Miracle

Y’know, I don’t have a problem with ambulatory people. In fact, a lot of my best friends are ambulatory. They are all welcome to use the mugs and plates in the upper kitchen shelves that I cannot reach, but could you please check back in a couple days, after I’ve had time to run your dishes through the dishwasher, to make sure that someone tall enough to replace those dishes has stopped by and done so? Otherwise the counters get cluttered with dishes that are too high for me to put away. I never use them, which is why they’re up high. There’s this one cup that someone got down a couple months ago and it’s still down. It keeps getting moved around the counter, but it’s still down. I’m ready to put a post- it on it now, asking for someone who’s able to put it back up where it belongs. I think it’s been washed three times now since it was actually used. It’s beginning to be a bit of a game. 🙀

So, my ambulatory friends, when you’re visiting your wheelchair-bound friends, it would be really great if you could offer to do a few of those little things that they cannot do or would take ten times longer for them to do. It would mean a lot to them and would help them immensely. They might not feel comfortable asking for your help. Thank goodness I have a couple of friends who do this already. I keep hoping I’m not going to wear them out.

Most of the time when I ask for help, Ifeel like an annoying, dripping faucet. I used to be the person who helped people all the time. Now I’m the one who has to have help a lot. It wears you down. I mean it truly makes your soul weary to have to ask for help all the time. 

Count your ability to walk effortlessly as the huge blessing it is. It’s devastating to lose that ability even for a short time. Yes, eventually you adjust, and if you have unlimited funds, you can customize things. Plus, your upper body, if that part of you still works, gets really strong. I now have killer biceps, whereas, in my biking days, I had killer quads, calves, and glutes. 

If you haven’t lived it or been with someone who has, you probably wouldn’t think about all the ways people in wheelchairs have to figure out again how to do basic things. I know when I used to ride my bike to work near Seattle, I was shocked at how many curbs weren’t wheelchair accessible. I was delighted when King County changed that and went all out to alter every corner so people in wheelchairs could go out without someone strong to get them up and down the curbs. I bet most ambulatory people didn’t even notice. I’m not sure if it was my prescience that made me notice things like that or what. 

On my mountain bike, I just jumped the unramped curbs. Try that in a wheelchair and you’ll end up doing a face plant and not be able to jump up and pretend it didn’t happen. No, you’ll just be lying there, possibly bleeding, waiting for help. Me, I just don’t go out much. It’s too hard and too dangerous most of the time. What do I do if my motorized wheelchair breaks down? I do have a manual one but have you ever wheeled yourself around in one of those for hours on end? I wheeled myself around in one for hours on end for a couple of years. They’re slow, so crossing a busy street is scary, they can break down too. Try bending a wheel and see how far you get. 

Not trying here to whine or complain. Just hoping to open a few eyes. There are people all around you who are in compromised health. Don’t wait to be asked for help. Offer willingly and with a smile, and if they say no the first time, make sure they really don’t need help. They might just be hesitant about accepting assistance. If they are still in an angry stage, they might push you away, but don’t judge. They have been through a lot and might not be willing yet to forgive the world for their current state.

Try to be a blessing wherever you go. No matter what your current ability or disability. You do have something to offer. I can’t do everything I used to do, and what I can do may take a really long time now, but I can do some things again. More things than a couple years ago. Hopefully two years from now, I’ll be doing much, much more. 

For now, I can write and read and edit. I can speak and listen. I can even do some housework. No, I can’t clean my house from top to bottom. Especially can’t clean the top of the house. But I can do some things. I may not have the strength to do a lot every day, but I keep trying to do more and get better at it. Much like anything else in the world. Do what you can to help others. You never know when you’ll be the miracle someone else needed.

Once in a Pink Moon?

I'm 58, and until this year, I'd never heard of a pink moon. A blue moon, definitely, but I had never come across this expression even though I often look up lunar information because I love astronomy. The attached article notes that one might think that the pink moon is the kind of thing you'd associate with Barbie. No doubt Barbie and Ken's first kiss took place under one of these [insert snarky emoji here].

Apparently, Native Americans named this moon based on when a certain flower (moss pink or creeping phlox) begins to bloom. Now that takes awareness of the world around you. I can honestly say that I've never pondered the onset of one of the first flowers to bloom in spring and its association to the full moon, and I consider myself pretty aware of the moon and its cycles. I also loved watching the advance of spring flowers while I lived in Washington. All of that seems lost when you live in Florida where there seem to be flowers blooming all year around. While I grew up here, I was away for 25 years, living in other places in the country where there are four actual seasons. Those seasonal changes are very subtle (sometimes nonexistent) in Florida.

While living farther north, I got used to the cyclical movement of seasons. In Washington, it was so distinct and in sync with the calendar, you could almost set your clock by it. Autumnal equinox was accompanied by a swift shift in weather. September 20th might be summer hot, but come the 21st or 22nd, you could be guaranteed cooler temps immediately. Winter solstice similarly brought cold weather with it. March 21st-22nd saw warmer temps, Only the summer solstice didn't guarantee hot weather because it doesn't get hot for very long in Washington, at least not in the Puget Sound region.

I realize that electricity brought huge changes to the average household in the last century, but we have become far too distanced from the environment around us. I admit that it wasn't until in my late twenties, once I moved away from Florida, that I began to pay attention to the moon's cycles and started noticing the subtle and not so subtle changes in the seasons. I think this delay was partly due to the fact that if you live in Florida in the summer, mosquitoes are a big deterrent to spending hours outside at night,  being entranced by the moon and stars. Quite frankly, I have a hard time seeing the stars with all the light pollution coming from Orlando. I didn't even begin really seeing the night sky regularly until I moved to Washington. It was there that I first learned about the periodic meteor showers and began marking my calendar for nights to go outside and watch for the Perseid, Geminid, and Leonid meteor showers, at least.

I used to witness the Perseid showers in August when I lived in North Carolina and often traveled back and forth to Florida to visit my family. I drove at night to avoid the heat, and I was often treated to what I thought were "shooting stars," only to realize later that I had been watching Perseid meteor showers all those years. The level of my ignorance at the time embarrasses me now. I so wish someone would have introduce me to such celestial phenomena earlier on, but live and learn. That's my motto. It's a good day when I learn something new. That's one of the many reasons I love the internet. I not only have access to so much new information on a daily basis, I also have access to you, my readers, to pass on the information I glean and find interesting in the hopes that you'll learn something new too. Each one, teach one. Enjoy the pink moon. Cheers!

https://hellogiggles.com/news/pink-moon-meaning/https://hellogiggles.com/news/pink-moon-meaning/

Photographs and Memories

If you're like me, you probably have lots of old photographs somewhere that you take out once in a while to look at them.  I've been thinking about scanning them all so I can keep them in digital format, thereby freeing up a lot of storage space in my closet.  While I would probably keep a number of the actual photographs, there are a lot that I would discard, if I can possibly bring myself to do that.  I have thrown away a few photos in my time, but mostly because they were badly blurred or damaged prints.  I have a hard time for some reason throwing away a perfectly good photo of someone, even if I haven't seen them since high school and barely remember their name. Somehow they represent some little piece of myself--a memory, a long-ago friend, a classmate.  I don't know if I'm afraid that I will discard a bit of myself if I toss out the photo.  What else would cause such a reluctance to jettison excess clutter, given that I've been pretty vigilant in de-cluttering my life as well as helping others with that process?  Am I concerned that the discarding of the photograph means that I have let go of a memory I can never get back?  Is that necessarily a bad thing, to let go of dusty photographs and equally dusty memories?

While I don't have an answer for that, I can say that photographs can be invaluable in offering insights into our lives and our psyches.  I have recently been puzzling over what appears to me to be a recurring them in my life, and that is rejection.  It started with my father and his rejection of responsibility towards his wife (my mother) and their three children.  Not only did he never live up to his financial responsibilities, he also never lived up to his parental and emotional responsibilities.  I don't normally talk about my father, because as far as I'm concerned he was my sperm donor and that's all.  My mother left him when I was six months old, and I'm glad she did before he bashed her head in.  That's what he was working on the day she decided to leave him. He was throwing her against the wall while she was trying to breastfeed me.  

While that is certain to get the Freudians out there licking their chops and nodding their heads over the fact that I am lesbian, that's not what I'm processing at the moment. What I'm processing is the concept of rejection. I've dealt with this so many times, you'd think I'd have licked it by now, but it seems not. I distinctly remember forgiving my father for his rejection of his children. Not only did he not take care of us while we live together, but he also neglected to care for us financially for my entire life. I was six months old when I mom left him, and from that point on until I, the youngest of three children, turned eighteen, he gave us a grand total of one hundred dollars. That's it. When asked why my mother didn't press the issue legally, she explains that he would have simply vanished, and she's probably right.They didn't pursue deadbeat dads very hard in those days. So instead she worked full time for my whole life, leaving the three of us with babysitters or finally as "latchkey kids" long before they coined that phrase. So not only did I experience rejection from my father's inability to take responsibility for his actions and his children, but I also experienced rejection by default from my mother, who had to go to work instead of caring for her six month old baby and my two slightly older siblings.  

While my mother didn't purposely reject us, she did have to feed and clothe us and make sure we had a roof over our heads, which meant that she had to spend all day at work. Her parents came to live with us so they could look after us kids, which was really good for the few years they were still alive. That got us through our early years at least. After they passed away, we had responsible teenagers who were family members or close friends of the family who looked after us until at the ripe old age of nine, eleven, and twelve, we were on our own with only the retired couple from across the street keeping an eagle eye on us from their front porch or living room window. These precious folks became another set of grandparents to us. I know none of us will ever forget their watchful care, even though we got pretty good at giving them the slip and escaping out the back door and over the fence once we hit the teenage years.  

All this time on our own, from the time I was nine, led me to being pretty independent in the long run. While my two older siblings have stayed closer to the old homestead (i.e., suburbia), I ventured off every time I got a chance, beginning when I was thirteen when I spent my first summer with my granny in Kentucky.  Not only did I spend every summer I could away from home during my high school years, but I also spent a year of college in Tennessee, and the other three years in a town a little over an hour away. After college, I left home and never came back except for a two-month stint when I purposely quit my job at an opportune time and went home for the express purpose of spending time with my mom. I had known then that my granny was going to die, so I was in a better position to visit her and to drop everything to attend her funeral.  Had I still been living and working in Seattle when that happened, that would have been harder to pull off.  As it was, my best friend and I simply got in the car and drove up there to be with my family on that side and to bid farewell to my granny, an amazing woman who will appear again in my writings here, no doubt.  

When I got back and was getting ready to spend some time with my mom, she got a call from her old job, from which she had been retired for a couple of years, and I barely saw her again while I was down there.  She came home on weekends, but she was pretty tired from working all week, so we just spent most of our time together quietly, which was fine. During the week while she was gone, I spent my time with my brother recording my music CD, Driftwood: The Music.  In the evenings, I either spent time with my sister at her apartment or I worked on background vocals and harmonies by myself at my mother's house with my two kitties, who had come with me for that two-month visit. The irony of my mother being called back to work during the time in my life that I had set aside specifically to spend with her did not escape me.  I had to spend some serious personal therapy time on that one a couple years later when the theme of rejection came up again.  While I was down there, the woman I had been working on being in a relationship with, but who had no time to spend with me because her grown daughter and her boyfriend had moved in with her, broke up with me AGAIN a couple days before my brother and I were to finish my end of the recording.  

Let me back up here and fill in a few gaps are far as relationships go.  Being lesbian is not an easy thing at any time in history anywhere.  Being a lesbian in a conservative Christian community in the South is a recipe for disaster.  To begin with, I was in denial about it to myself, sort of. I didn't deny that I had a tendency to be attracted to close female friends. That much was pretty obvious. But I was in denial about living out and proud because I felt that I had been called into the ministry, to serve God as a teacher and leader of young people.  Ahem.  Not a good idea in conservative Christian circles if you are gay.  So until I left conservative Christianity, essentially my relationships were all doomed to end badly.  No matter how much I loved these women, guilt won in the end, and I lost.  

Then as I got out of those circles, my relationships began to last longer and therefore deepen. But alas, I suspect the damage had been done for me. I wanted my relationships to last, and I stuck with them until it was obvious that I shouldn't be there any more. I had two separate relationships that last for six years each.   Had the laws been different then, at least one of those would have involved marriage.  The other one, not so much because the woman had already been married once and was not interested in getting hitched to someone else. Both ended for reasons that won't be discussed out of respect for the former partners. While I was the one to walk away from both of these, it was only after the death knoll had been sounding for a while. Although I took the blame both times, it takes two to Tango and when one stops dancing, it gets really uncomfortable.  

That leads me back to the relationship that very nearly sucked my soul out of my chest and left me for dead.  Although I had a couple of brushes with perfectly good potential partners while I was in a couple of the out periods of this in and out, in and out thing we were doing, those were doomed from the beginning because I was in those days like the walking dead in some ways.  I recognized that I didn't have much to give because there wasn't much of me left.  It took a couple years of living on Puget Sound for me to heal from this disaster of a relationship.  I did finally heal, mostly.  I was healed, but I was still rather fragile.   Being the fool I am, however, I wasn't able to leave well enough alone.  At the end of the disaster of a relationship, I met a woman, that I can safely say turned my world upside down.  I wanted badly to be with her, but she was married.  So instead of letting go completely of the bad relationship that was really at that point only a nasty hangover, I clung to that dead corpse of the old relationship, as well as the excuse of this new women having a child, and told her that I wasn't interested.  

It's never good to lie.  Not to yourself.  Not to others.  I committed the worse kind of lie.  I thought about it long and hard and then lied to her.  Whatever the rationale, however altruistic, it was still a lie.  I should have at least told her the truth: She rocked my world, but I couldn't even think about being in a relationship with a woman who was married, no matter what the extenuating circumstances in that marriage. She needed to work on coming out to herself and the world around her, and everything that meant, and she needed to do it on her own terms, for her own reasons, and not because she had fallen for me.  AND I needed to protect myself from the fallout of everything she needed to do for herself before she could be with me.  I didn't tell her all those things, and I have regretted that to this day.

I'm not sure I could have articulated each of those things in the moment as well as I can today, but that's what it boiled down to, even though I blamed it on something else.  With that lie, I broke her heart, and I knew it would, even though I did think that it was better that she find her way without the pressure of having someone waiting in the wings.  Only now after we have been together on and off, while the divorce has painstakingly played out, she has broken mine, because all these years later, it has still come down to the same thing. She needs to have time to go through all she has to go through and decide if she is still interested in being in a relationship with me once she gets to the other side.  Apparently for some masochistic reason, probably the rejection theme, I had to stand by and watch her walk away with my heart in her hands. Eventually, she just walked away altogether and I had to let her go. 

Back to the photographs I've been reluctant to discard. I have a large photograph of my fourth grade class. Just before the photo was taken, my boyfriend at the time, we'll call him Robert since that was his name, broke up with me. We were going steady. Yes, I was nine, but love was important even back then. In the class photo, he is sitting grinning like the Cheshire cat, while I am for all intents and purposes sitting there with a broken heart, pouting. What an image to capture for my lifetime memory book. Yet it is very telling. It is a photographic representation for my whole life as far as love is concerned. Sad, but true.

A string of broken hearts is nothing to be proud of, but perhaps they are why I am a poet and a singer/songwriter. Perhaps they are responsible for all of the books I've written and published too. Is it a fair trade off for a life of love with one person? I can't say since I'll never know what that feels like. I do know now what it feels like to have loved someone for decades and to know that they have loved me for all those decades too. For larger reasons and greater purposes, we didn't find our way into a love relationship until late in life, but at least we are together now and I can finally heal that nine-year-old girl in the photograph. It's about time, wouldn't you say?