The gain of loss

I am living my blue hour, in every inch of my body and soul, in every breath I take, in every dream I dream, abandoning my joy on the shore of sorrow. The river of my life has broken into streams of pain, in open wounds that fractured my consciousness mercilessly.

Drifting in my solitude, I am losing myself into memories that make my heart ache, tripping into a parallel selfness. Unsettled and fearful, I am striving to find myself in chaos.

Grief-stricken as I am now, when I am no longer a child, I am witnessing my conscious mind meeting the unbearable reality of being motherless. Awaken from the dream of childhood, I find myself wandering about into a bare soul, deprived of the ornaments of love.

Breathlessly, I am picking up fragments of myself, dying inside my pain million times, ripping my memories, falling into my soul precipice, alone with my grief.

My grief ascends in my mind with an unexpected tidal force piercing to the very core of my being. No man is unplundered by loss one way or another.

The art of tackling bereavement holds in the first place the rawest sentiments of mooring into one’s senses until we collapse into the consuming gravity of pain. Considering my grief poisonous and bellicose, I cannot cope with it, but I have been trying to intervene and put an end on it. Grief has a cadence of its own, a life that comes to an end in its own terms.

It has been a useless endeavour, a Sisific journey into the forest of my soul and the harder I have been fighting, the stronger my grief becomes. I stop for a while, petrified, then I break the rhythm of my pain, diving into it even deeper.

I haven’t run away from my grief, but water it, striving to learn how to grieve meaningfully, cause my grief should be grieved wonderfully until it turns into a transcendental poetry of the soul.

This uneasy task is conjuring cohesion and purpose, so I treat my grief as if it were a thorn deeply thrust into my flesh: I grab it by the neck and take it out of my soul and let it dwell in my body, giving it a palpable physicality.

I always dreaded mortality. It scared me internally like I was sheltering a tapeworm eager to consume my life from within, leaving me lifeless. Now, I realise that the passing is nothing but a portal to non-existence, where grief is no longer your companion. It is the fading of the dear ones that tears me apart irremediably, walking me into my personal hell where I am mourning my inner dissolution.

As she walked on the other side, what a torment for the sore heart! Insufferable it is, so that the body takes over and aches on behalf of the soul. My joints are undergoing the agony of not letting go, my mind elopes with magic in order to escape the suffering, my spine is pushing me downwards into a tomb of my own, carrying the burdens of the world.

Death as night, travelling into a momentary darkness, occurs when each day falls into its sleep and we wake up the next day, slightly reformed, ready to die again when the sun enters in its dormant dream.

While being haunted by maman’s absence, I have had a blessed epiphany: that I have to live with her presence, because she is still here, under my skin, into my soul. She is getting younger on the other side of life and she will be reborn inside me, mending the landscapes of my soul with love.

The thought of her on the veranda of my dreams makes me dive into my so(u)litude. I have decided to elope with my pain as if it was a beautiful villain.

I am entering into my sacred space of grief, conquering my geometry of senses, finding mam there and making her my own mender. As a cathartic goddess, she appears in my mind with a renewed vibration, offering me her kindness. I know now that if you want to escape your sadness, you have to travel outside your pain.

I am starting to build a mind retreat where my soul will find redemption in the earthly delights that sow joy in sorrow. On my healing path, I have met my mam again, as my ‘’anam munteoir’’ (my soul teacher). And she has tamed my heart terrors. Like a baby I was again, snugged, hugged, wrapped in the warmth of her heart, sheltered from my storms and caressed with a gentle touch of love.

Pardoned by a benevolent God, I have started to spend time with myself, unearthing my sense of grief. I discovered that it wasn’t I who shaped my sorrow, but my sorrow shaped me, in an illusory and tantalising unpredictability.

I had to learn how to let go. So, I have started a journey into my soul, guided by my sorrow, an emblematic and irreplaceable entity that cannot be domesticated. A mind paddling experience of immersing myself into my grief opens the universe of my thoughts, gently, with care.

When it is raw inside you, you can find a space of wounded silence and reflection and start to allow the mornings of your soul to collapse into its unsettling evenings and you actually prepare yourself to know another kind of you, beyond the horizon of your own mind.

And…you begin living with presence. When the loved ones depart, your presence is lost into a painful absence of oneself. Grief is the telescope that makes you see your own stars on the sky of your soul.

In the deep perturbances of death, we are connected to a higher self that guides us through grief.

Losing mam awakens in me centuries of solitudes, screaming in the stillness of my being.

Feeling the decline of my life as I know it, I step in the fragility of my thoughts, participating to my inner turmoil, growing a white noise in my head, a muffled scream, unheard in my mind, but piercing my soul fiercely.

Striving to understand death, we, mere creatures in search of control, repelling the state of affairs we are in, being on strike and fighting for our soul’s restoration.

I started living inside me, cause there, I had all my memories with her. There…..she never gets old, never dies, but becoming an immortal being trough me, breathing through my skin.

Even if grief changed my life fabric and the gossamer turns into a heavy, rough felt, I found myself restored by transferring all my pain into another self, the one who knows how to deal with it…my spiritual self who travels outside my heart.

You may ask me about the darkness of my grief….There is a sudden lack of light, indeed, but that is because I had been trying too hard to cease my pain. So, I have gone gently into my pain, lightly, learning to tiptoe around my wounds, to feel lightly even if I am feeling my pain deeply.

And eventually, I let things happen and lightly dealt with them. And….another thing…I have been too serious, too determined to sort the things out as if they were broken. The only thing you have to know about loss is you are not able to fix anything, but to accept it, to live with it, to cope with your sadness and turn everything into a magnificent adventure of the self.

Apologetically, I have greeted my grief, doing a soul salutation, entering in the heart of my lightness and stepping into the cradle of my pain, where everything started in the first place. There, I have found my true emotions that wrinkled my soul and opened the doors of perception into my mind.

So, I have started to treat my darkness lightly, and I realised that love upstages death and all my tears have washed my love for her, making it pure. And I have smiled again, inside me, as if sunsets moved temporarily into my soul.

Grief is in fact love with no destination. It is love that moves into a memory, the memory of being loved and love back in a perpetual game of beautiful sadness. Once the recipient of love is gone, love is wandering about, like an unsound breeze travelling erratically above world.

But, on the other hand, love is not egocentric, it will do whatever it takes for the dear one, it will move the mountains, entertaining the idea of sacrifice for a denouement we want. But what about the wish of the one who departs? We are longing for permanence, cushioning our egotistic self that doesn’t want to let go. Nevertheless, we need to be true to ourselves, to let our mythical self win, the one that transcends time in allegorical trinkets of magic.

So, I have eventually gained the sense of my loss: to be tragically true to my soul, cherish the sovereignty of my thoughts irrespective of their weight and discover the radiant form of my grief in order to gently enter the light of life.

There is a space where we meet the departed, a place of spiritual longing for a true home which maybe never was, in the lost places of our souls, in the realm of nowhere and of everywhere. According to the Welsh belief, this kind of place is called Hiraeth, a realm of nostalgic soul artifacts.

Do not go into despair, cause the loved ones never die, but carry themselves into another dimension of the self!