Life After ‘Life’ Has Ended

Sitting numbly in the corner, barely able to move, the mind is reduced to mush in response to what has just occurred—even if that was months ago now, on a night like tonight or a day like today.

The romance that has characterised years of a pristinely-built identity has shrivelled overnight and is no more... those words “no more” have a pitch starkness about them and we have the bells of disbelief ringing between our ears.

Control is a thing we no longer have.

Whether it was by betrayal or falling out of love or the case of mismatch—or probably worse, by a spouse’s physical death—matters little at this stage as we reel in utter incredulity how life can be this gratingly raw.

Depths of loss can hardly be bridged in words—the whisper of death comes to the centre of our being and, again, we are “no more,” or so it seems.

The Death Of Something Precious

How do we give appropriate testimony or legacy or dignity to something so special that has been so sinfully ripped apart, limb for limb from the body that was two persons entwined as one?

There is the sublime sorrow that pins itself to us, a clinging vestige of nothingness, the appendage of darkness for glories gone by but never to return.

What To Do With The Mid-Time?

We may be in the mid-time, or at least we relate for some dark period in the oft-forgotten ether of our pasts. Such memories call back the taste of emotion, instantly, but that’s all. Strangely, we’re home to such pain. It’s become part of us.

Wisdom suggests we might learn something in this horrible baseness. It’s a sadistic reality we must hold to; it’s all we have.

The mid-time is about approaching something new from within us; the reconstruction of identity. We are becoming ourselves, again.

Re-Entering Life... When Grief Finally Departs

How long must grief linger?

It continues until it ends, and that ending comes without notice; far further off in the distance, much of the time, than any of us would like. And still, of occasion, a reminder takes us back there for a split second, an hour, a day.

***

Then, do we resume life? No; it cannot be.

This is new. We are reborn. It’s the only way it can be if we’re truly healed of the ballistic damage that impacted against us, obliterating the old self. Yet, we are still, and will always be, one-and-the-same person.

We have become better (and hopefully not bitter) for all this rubbish that went on.

***

‘The end of us’ is an all-too-familiar tale of two gone separate ways. Some death has occurred and the mind struggles to handle what the heart still grieves.

When grief ends, though, and it does (for most), there is learning and acceptance. We grow and move and become bigger people for the experiences of death that threatened to swallow us, but didn’t.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

The article was inspired by Adele’s song, Set Fire To The Rain.