This is a personal story of true love found and lost, and of my effort to make medicine from what has eclipsed an easy resolution.
I offer it in case it meets you in your own reckoning with ambiguous loss, and invites some sense of alliance or companionship along your way. The story is told in nine consecutive parts and can be found on my free Substack publication “Meeting Life” in Video, Audio & Written Versions.
Here’s the Link to Part 1:
MAKING MEDICINE OF AMBIGUOUS LOSS: A NINE-PART STORY
Excerpt:
Part 1. The Prayer
There are so many variations of loss that come with life, and the longer we live, the more forms of loss we get to taste, maneuver, and work through our beautiful human hearts.
A couple of years ago, after more than five years of being single, without having had even so much as a date with a man, I made a strong, clear prayer. My prayer was one of simple availability to an extraordinary man coming into my life.
It wasn’t a demand, nor even an attachment to it happening. It was an openness, paired with surrender. A flavor of “Thy will be done”: If a partnership might be in true alignment with my path at this time, then may it come.
It took courage even to make the prayer; to let my body and heart feel the sweet vulnerability of desire and willingness.
When we’ve loved deeply and been disillusioned, over and over, the notion of pursuing a partnership begins to take on a different shape in our heart. No longer do we harbor some fantasy of a perfect love.
We know that even the deepest and most aligned of unions will test and stretch us in ways that profoundly challenge our growth, our identity, and our preferences.
I was also well aware that the deep, harrowing passage I was in with my beloved son at that time—as he was fiercely initiated into manhood, wrestling with dark forces and lineage patterns—was far from complete.
I always hoped true healing might be just around the bend, but by then we were more than a year and a half in, and while I couldn’t know how much longer this season of initiation would last, I certainly knew we weren’t out of the woods.
So I wondered: Was it fair, or even responsible, to open my body, heart, and life to a partner while still navigating such a ruthless chapter of motherhood?
Was some part of me looking to romantic love as a way to escape the nightmare?
When we have a child who is unwell, pretty much nothing else matters besides what it takes to hold vigil for their healing and recovery.
I wondered: Would I even have the bandwidth to tend to a newfound love?
On the other hand, this long season of crisis was taking a toll on my woman-heart and my faith. It was all-consuming and heartbreaking. I had been carrying so much for so long, largely on my own.
My deeply feminine heart and soul longed to feel a true, mature man at my back.
And there was some mysterious wisdom inside my own self-knowing; instinctively sensing that it would serve my life and my health to be opened by love…..”
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