The Dawning

Part I — Return of the light

It felt like a manic episode. It even reads and sounds like a manic episode to me when I go back over what I wrote about the events of that week. My best friend tried very hard to convince me that’s what I was experiencing. But the universe knew she would react like that. Which is why it brought me there and staged such an elaborate end to our relationship.

And yet, I most definitely dissociated. I realize now that it wasn’t the first time. I’ve spent the last four months trying to come to terms with my experience. I think I might be coming to understand what happened.

It’s a story of grief. And love. Time and travel. And something that can only be explained if one sets aside their belief that what we can see or understand with our physical senses is in fact all there is. But I believe in magic of a sort (in some ways because of the very woman I mentioned above). And that what we know as “reality” is both fluid and essentially all an illusion anyway. So I came somewhat prepared for this existential journey. Climb aboard. This is one helluva ride!

In the beginning there was love. Just your typical man and woman in their early twenties meeting, doing the dance of the eons, and falling in love. It took a couple years for them to get past the rush of “this is the one” and admitting that we don’t really choose who we fall in love with. Because neither would likely have chosen the other, if they had known how it was all going to turn out. Or maybe they would have, because if you’ve known love, well, you know it’s not something you’d let slip through your fingers.

These sorts of things are decided long before we come here and though we may believe it’s our stellar personality, fabulous good looks and superior intellect that our mates have chosen, it’s really completely out of our hands. What’s meant to be, will always be. ’Cause nothing that happens here is random. Free will is mostly a fantasy we like to believe in because it gives us a sense of control. It feeds our ego and our ego is the thing that blocks our memory of true reality. And boldly going forth without that memory is the only way we can experience the life we come here to live.

So this couple did the thing they came here to do. They loved each other. And they spent a lifetime together. At least her lifetime. They created a family. Four children and countless memories. Over a span of nearly twenty five years. Until the day she died, three years after diagnosis, in the early morning hours on the Monday before Thanksgiving.

The day I dissociated for the first time was November 22, 2009.

My wife was dying. She had been actively dying for the last several hours. Her mother and I had been by her side continuously since sometime after midnight. Mary, Liz’ mother, told me to go get some rest since I had been up all night and I think she really wanted to spend a few minutes alone with her daughter before the end.

I went into the bedroom, laid down and closed my eyes. A great tsunami of grief came over me. It felt like it lifted me off the bed some four feet or so into the air. I wailed a great sob of anguish and fell back onto the bed. Time, or maybe it was reality itself, shifted in some inexplicable way. I laid in bed for awhile longer. I have no idea how much time passed before I got up and went back out into the living room.

My wife’s breath was coming in ragged gasps and she was both unresponsive and in obvious distress. I called the doctor and got the okay to administer another dose of morphine. I have no idea to this day how much time passed before the end finally arrived. I held one hand and Mary held the other. I do know that I called hospice again and the nurse that had first declared that she wasn’t “actively dying” was onsite and waiting with us by the time it was over. I don’t know who called the coroner or really anything that happened other than that I had gone into the sun room to tell the kids that their mother had died and that if they wanted to say goodbye now was their last chance.

There’s a fog that comes with grief. I walked around for days in that fog. And some of it lifted. Enough to keep going anyway. Back to work three days later. And onto some kind of new life. But I wasn’t me anymore. I sorta felt like me. I sounded and acted like me, to most people anyway. But my personality had changed. I no longer saw much of any purpose in my career. The hobbies I’d embraced for decades brought nothing pleasurable into my life. Grief looks a lot like depression. But it’s not at all the same thing.

The worst part about all of it is that I had no memories. With the exception of flashes of moments in time, everything was gone! I knew who I was and I had this knowledge of a life that I had lived and loved but I couldn’t access any of the memories from before the day my wife died. Trying to remember anything of my childhood, or the life I had shared with Liz, felt like looking at a blank wall. I knew there were good things on the other side of that wall but something was keeping me from remembering them.

But I had four kids to feed, clothe and to somehow teach that there was something worth being alive for in the utter destruction that losing the monumental presence that was their mother, had brought to our family. I don’t think I succeeded. Because until the week after August 19, 2023, I didn’t really believe it myself.

And yet, I stumbled along. I met a widow with three children of her own. We fell into something that looked like love. Or lust. Or maybe just skin hunger. But being this new empathetic, charismatic widower (I was neither empathetic nor charismatic before losing my wife), I somehow kept it together for close to four years. I drank too much but I stayed attached until the day she decided enough was enough. I moved out, and took the only one of my kids still living with me. I think it made his life quite a bit more challenging. I was becoming a less and less effective parent with every year that passed.

A week or so later I was involved with another woman. And I thought I was in love again! It was a relationship even rockier than the previous one. With an anxiously attached, clinically depressed and somewhat bipolar woman who was the mother of one of my older son’s friends. We would spend the next three years in and out of this rather volatile relationship. From where I am now, I barely recognize the man who loved that beautiful, passionate, intelligent and spectacular mess of a woman who ran marathons to hang on to her sanity. And I still think she’s something very special. But I’m not the right kind of man to love her. We danced with each other’s demons and while I wouldn’t recommend such an experience to anyone I cared about, I can’t deny that it brought lots of spice to my life.

Out of the final destruction of that star-crossed relationship came a new best friend. And something more. Yes, it’s the woman I reference at the very beginning of this story, the one who tried to convince me that I’d lost my mind. And to this day I’m both grateful for and embarrassed by how it all turned out. The friendship gave me something I desperately needed. But we took it beyond a friendship. And I’m to blame for the way it distorted the friendship into something that hurt us both. Despite all this, nothing that has led me to where I am today would have happened if things had been any other way.

The universe works in mysterious ways. I don’t believe any of it is an accident. I’m as grateful for the experience of loving that widowed woman, the depressed, bipolar marathon runner and my ex-best friend as I am for spending over two decades with the love of my life. Every single one of those experiences was a gift. I hope someday they can look back on loving me with the same “it’s all a gift” kind of attitude. Because to see it as anything else minimizes just how magnificent it is to be alive and allowed to love another soul. I’m afraid though that I left enough damage in my wake that it’s gonna take some time, if any of them ever get there.

I woke up on the morning after the winter solstice and everything had changed. This day would have been my wife’s 61st birthday, December 22, 2023. With the return of the light to the northern hemisphere, my memories came flooding back. All of them! Like the bursting of a giant dam, they washed over me. I cried for a long time. And then I spent the next three hours writing everything down in the fear that I would lose them all again. Eventually though, I realized that they were here to stay. And that I was beginning to integrate the experience of late August with the man I had lost all those years ago. And I began to feel something like hope again.

I don’t know how this is all gonna turn out. When I reach for the memories of the last decade and a half it’s almost like they’re the memories of some different person. I know it was me that loved those women (and didn’t treat them very well). I know it was me that spent the last three years living in a van all over the continent. I also know that the man I was in 2009 didn’t have the balls to do any of the things I’ve done since then. These newer memories have the texture of being the memories of someone else.

The memories of the time before Liz died have a solid “these are my real memories” feel. It’s almost as if the “real” me has been on ice for the last fourteen years and a stranger has been living in my body all this time. I feel like I’ve gone back in time to retrieve some sort of “missing” half of myself.

I like some parts of the new me and I’m embarrassed by other parts of him. And I like some of who I was before this new me appeared but he didn’t have much courage. So I hope maybe I’m a bit more complete now. Or maybe I’m as crazy as that woman at the top of this piece believed me to be back in August. Either way, this is who I am right now. And this me wants to tell the story as truthfully as I can muster.

Anyway, like I said up near the top, stick around, this promises to be an interesting trip.

Author’s note: I’m trying to put together a book. This tale has been really, really hard to tell. I’ve tried and failed multiple times. Much of what I’ve written in the past is embarrassing to me. So I took it all down. Because I believe in starting over when one crashes into a wall. Follow along if you like. As long as it’s in this format I won’t be trying to monetize it. Maybe that will come later if I can manage to extract a book out of my confused and intractable brain.