Solo Mother

Heartfelt

by christina on November 24th, 2007

There have been some big, quiet, oddly painful hurts going around inside me lately. In conversations with men and women who have lost their spouses and are trying to put the pieces back together, to knit some kind of life with the fragments they have left, I have stumbled often upon the gaping hole where history once resided.

When you lose someone you once loved, not only do you lose the physical presence of that person as a positive force in your life, but you lose all that shared history. As you make new friends, as you pursue new romances, you keep skirting around the edges of this gaping maw where a shared past once nestled. You’ll suddenly find yourself disoriented and confused in the middle of a story, wondering, “Did I already tell you this?” and find those layers of memory peeling back like mica, the odd transparency of having told this thing so long ago to another him, told by another someone, another you…

someone who those you gather to you in this present life can only know by inference.

I’ve found a few more eloquent, artistic expressions of this sentiment… at least, when I saw junquegirl’s Heartfelt/Heartfound, it made me think immediately of this process of loss… I find her work to be so eloquent, I do hope you’ll take the time to sift through her imagery. Once she gives me permission to post an image here, I’ll do so, but for now, please go look.

And the novel, The Brief History of the Dead, by Kevin Brockmeier, startled me this evening as I read:

“But whenever she would come into contact with someone new, someone whose stories she didn’t already know by heart, sooner or later that person would start talking about days gone by, and she would get the sad, sickening feeling that too much had already happened to him and it was far too late for her to ever catch up. How could she ever hope to know someone whose entire life up to the present was already a memory? For that matter, how could anyone hope to know her?”

A dear, single father said to me, “I finally realized I’d simply have to make new memories.” A brave sentiment, but oh so difficult to do. It gets easier, though. Just remember to be kind to yourself. Don’t be impatient when the tears and the squeezing heart sneak up on you, well past the point when you thought you’d be over this. The history of your heart is in the making, every day. You’re never too old for a new beginning.

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POSTED IN: dating, divorce