A New Emptiness After Loss

For the first time in years, I blew through the holidays with no care for review or goal setting. I did not want to reflect on the past or find hope for the future. I was just tired and focused on what was right in front of me. Reading the story in animal signs during a snowy walk through the forest. Stacking wood to warm my parents’ cottage for the next month. Tasting my mom’s warm and flavorful meals at the massive pine table my dad built. Smiling at my children snuggling in for a movie with the family.

I often forget that life is really best done by living fully in the moment before pushing on to the next or looking back to the last. It doesn’t matter how many hours of meditation I put in, my monkey mind is strong. I waste a lot of energy chasing my tail.

Taking time to sit with my moments and push away everything else felt right. I usually feel like I’m running around with a half a tank of gas, one eye on the road and the other checking how fast I’m burning fuel. For a few brief days over the holidays, I let that worry go and stopped trying to get anywhere.

Then it came to me: I need force myself to approach life in a completely different way since Gage died. Like many with loss, my life is divided into a Before and After. I’m still trying to figure out the After. Sometimes I throw all of myself into learning, pushing, fighting, and running. And other times, I have gone too far and stop everything to catch my breath. I’m a sprinter by nature, so I understand my pattern. There are brief moments, when I pace my strides just right. Then the urge to push my muscles grows and grows until I need to meet it with as much power as I can muster. When that power is completely used up, the release and emptiness are the reward.

That was my gift to myself for the holidays; sweet release and emptiness. In the effort to find meaning, I can push too hard and miss it all. I keep looking for patterns, lessons, and ways to wrap up the story of my loss into a clean resolution. I keep trying to use my Before mind and skills in my After, when I should know better by now. 

Maybe there is no simple formula or path to follow that will bring me to the epiphany of my story. No hero’s journey to guide me to all the wisdom gained in my struggles. I need to just live in the After, like I did this past December and find a new way of emptiness. It’s in the right kind of emptiness where I can feel most alive, because it’s where I can really receive what’s coming my way.