Seeking a New Way to Be

Day 757.

It’s a Saturday, the day we heard that our world was forever changed. 

Two years on I am a new person. 

This person has some of my old attributes and a part of me that was once there in a small measure is somehow greater, reflective, as if I am trying, as I did when I was a child, to piece the massive jigsaw of my life and the world, into a direction. But not in a proactive way, but in a coma-like fashion. Allowing thoughts to float through my mind, and instead of discussing them or chasing and researching, I allow them to pass through under careful observation.

I am in an in utero state, and instead of rushing the thoughts through to a logical conclusion, I observe and file them into my mind.

How we will move forward, and how I can make an impact on this crisis of our time that will have with meaning and force change.

How I can make my life worth it now that my children are.. well one grown and one dead?. I am free to do new work. The fact that the changes required seem so hard or impossible does not interest me. I am not willing to just sit back and allow more to die, and leave their Mother’s lost. Just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean I should give up.

Makes me think of Mrs.Mandela, Nelson’s Mum. “Don’t be daft Nelson! Stop dreaming and eat your breakfast!”

And Martin Luther King and Gandhi’s Mums too. If they had all stopped dreaming, where would we be now?

Oh, I am no Mandela, King... But maybe I can inspire the next one.

Ignite the heroes of our opioid age, bring the various groups together and unite them.

This is the focus of my planned trip across the USA, a trip to unite the power of our grief and helpless rage. To join in one force for good. We are so many, how can we capitalize on this? There is work to be done! 

But I just feel so lazy, so leaden that I know not how. But I’ll float here, in my amniotic grief, until one by one, the ideas of my jigsaw will fall into a picture. I can hear Luke laughing at that- ‘amniotic grief’. 

Because I will never be the same, I’m never going to move on. It’s not like “Oh I had this child who grew into a lovely man, he took drugs and died. Well, that was that, and now he’s gone. Hey ho, life goes on”.

Luke was not a favorite pair of shoes that I left on a plane. 

Luke is not someone I met, loved and lost, and now I move on.

It’s the biggest conundrum of my grief. How do I move forward, not move on?

Because I can never forget him, or the awful loss of him, nor should I, nor do I want to... there’s no danger of it, it’s just confusing to struggle and work towards repair because, in truth, I seek to function within my shattered state, not repair it.

It’s not that I am not trying, it’s more that recovery is not available.

A new state is sought. A state that is not yet clear. And so I float on, watching, listening, being, till then.