Public Domain Photo by Carol Weinsheimer
One day I received a surprise. Our local florist delivered a beautiful flower arrangement, a dish garden, from my old college friend, Ruth, (The Belle of Cowbell: the Bipolar Therapist from Willow Grove, PA). The card said, “Now you have plenty of time to contemplate the universe.” She was right!
What was the occasion? I had fallen down a flight of stairs at another dear friend’s home and ended up with a broken nose, sutures, rug burns, contusions, bruises all over, and symptoms of a concussion. I visited my friend at her lovely home on a large wooded property, so I could have a brief getaway from the stress that had been accumulating, due to the illnesses and problems of multiple family members and also due to the flooding issues we had at our home. It didn’t quite work out the way I had planned.
Two of our family members at that time, were dealing with endings and consequently, so were we. My mother-in-law was in a nearby assisted living facility for dementia patients. Her memory was very poor and she was emotionally labile, but still retained some of her lifelong personality (and anxieties). With each passing month we had witnessed more of her decline. My husband’s brother had very recently been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer. This was a shock to everyone, of course. Others close to us were wending their way through various life crises of considerable magnitude, doing their best to come to terms with the past, to embrace today, and to find joy instead of pain.
After my mishap, I was ordered by my doctor to rest and I did, though that has not always been easy for me. It was much less easy with all that was happening in our lives. I needed to do this in order to mend, though.
When I think about it, this pattern of “ending, wending and mending” is repeated throughout our lifetimes. There are always endings of one sort or another. We experience the end of a favorite season, the end of a school year, the end of childhood, the end of adolescence and the advent of adult responsibilities, the end of innocence, the end of health. We live through or watch the end of relationships, the end of marriages, and end of life as people and pets who are close to us die. We are rarely ready and prepared for the endings. It is more often the beginnings for which we prepare ourselves, though they happen on their own regardless of our preparation, because nature has the power to create new life out of nothingness.
We are always starting fresh. We are forever wending our way through new adventures, new challenges, new life stages, and also through new personal and even spiritual crises. Hopefully we are learning as we travel, how to be better and emotionally stronger, how to be more peaceful, more purposeful, more loving, and more forgiving to ourselves and others. We cannot avoid the winding roads and crumbling bridges of life. We must figure out how to cross them, using all of our faith, creativity and the tools we have acquired prior to reaching the places where we suddenly find ourselves temporarily stopped.
We learn by trial and error and we move on. We have little choice. When times are very tough, we may feel lost and alone. We may even contemplate a shorter route to the end that perhaps seems easier because we believe it will curtail our heartache. Yet taking such a road heaps agony and torment upon those who love us. They are then left to fight through their own darkness, till they happen upon a flash of new hope and purpose.
When we have experienced the pain of an ending, regardless of what type, we must somehow begin anew at wending our way through the grief and the fear that accompanies such endings. We must grow from that grief and fear. The growth occurs even as we do our level best to fight and prevent it, and try to wallow in our own suffering.
Too often we isolate ourselves. We perceive ourselves to be in a hell designed uniquely for us. We do so because we cannot imagine that anyone else can remotely comprehend our distress. Sometimes we may actually believe we have done something to deserve the agony we are enduring, or that we’ve neglected to do something to prevent whatever has happened. We have little or no belief in the possibility that there is a happier future for us.
At times like these we may feel we are traveling through a tunnel. We know the world goes on around us. We sense the rush of the river above our heads and everything around seems very removed from us. We don’t feel that we are a part of anything, or that anyone can truly know our emotions. It may feel that we will never mend but the mending happens in spite of us, if we let it.
I very much like the quote by Peter S. Beagle, who said, “Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A quest may not simply be abandoned, unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever, a happy ending cannot come in the middle of a story.”
Most of us are not heroes, though, or we surely don’t think of ourselves that way. We find ourselves crushed by loss, by mistakes and various other life mishaps and tragedies. Still, while one tale of life may have ended, there are always other tales already taking shape while our wounds are still dripping fresh blood and our tears are raining down. New letters and words are forming on blank pages as we sit in mourning, confusion, heartache and paralysis. That is simply how it works.
If you have lost a loved one, I wish you peace and that happy memories will soon grow larger than the sad ones. If your life has been hard lately due to any kind of ending at all, or just a hard change, I hope you will think about where you are in your story. I hope you will come to see that all of our stories go on, even after we are not here. We can’t control the Universe. Once we realize this, we can take the risks needed to feel better and to resume our personal quests.
I wish I could promise the rest will be easy and that you will be led automatically to that happy ending, but I can’t. You will keep on wending your way through the world, fitting together small pieces of the puzzle (and maybe even making a little sense of things). You will live and you will mend.
