Letting go

I can no longer sit with a blank look on my face and pretend that I haven't yet realized that my own suffering is mainly caused by my unwillingness to let go of the people I love the most in life. Yes, I said let go. This roller coaster began at the hour of my birth and continues to this day, no matter how much wiser I become.

I think my first understanding of letting go came the tragic day I decided to let go of my kids, for lack of any other feasible option. After an emotion-drenched duel with their dad and "new mom" and all of their little lost friends, I lost the fight due to my own isolation I had allowed to become my world. I had isolated myself from anything that had the potential to pull me into life's path and it cost me dearly. It charged me my sanity when I laid my life out in front of myself and saw that I had nothing to offer my kids because I'd spent all my energy and time trying to remain in the background so that my husband could feel as though he were really moving forward. I fell so hard and so deep into a pit of overwhelming grief that I felt like every waking moment was like that moment of tunnel vision when you find yourself in a fight or flight situation and your instinct to annihilate your opponent takes over. You only see that person and only feel the rage that drives your body to move like it has no limitations. You hear nothing, see only who stands in front of you and fear no consequence. That animalistic state is what I speak of. This was my waking dream. My nightmare.

When I watched my babies in diapers being pulled out of my arms, screaming sadness and reaching for me like they knew their lives depended on making it back into my arms, I lost all ability to reason or function in this world and any trust in the human race vanished in one instant of a sadness I pray to whatever God is out there will never fall upon my life again.

I barely slept and ate only when my body gave in to the emptiness it knew it could not sustain. Funny how that emptiness paled in comparison to my empty soul. I was a shell. A hollow cage of a human being and void of all desire to live. I stopped singing; stopped writing; stopped caring about anything that existed. Everything looked like it had a grey haze surrounding it.

I remember forcing a smile one day in the mirror out of curiosity of my ability to still perform this infantile response. I realized that for it to really look like a smile, some level of emotion was mandatory. I thought, "I have lost the ability to feel anything at all..." but then my vision, clouded by the rainstorm of heartache, reminded me that there was still plenty of tragedy in my heart.

I asked and pleaded for death. I was dead on the inside but I was cruelly forced to remain in a body sound enough to know it. Who had I done so terribly wrong in my life that it had earned me this torture?

I considered putting the cold barrel into my mouth and leaving only a pool of blood to show that I had existed. I thought about walking until my legs and arms could no longer drag me and allowing the darkness to swallow me into whatever lies on the other side of this life. I realized that I sensed that it was there. But this did not awaken me.

But I just didn't have the strength left in me to do either. As I laid in silence in a room I can't seem to remember, my mind made a decision that forever changed me. I recall the sound of the phone ringing in the other room and watching myself from above pick it up and wait for the words that would be the most critical phrase ever spoken to me, even to this day...

"Rachel and Jacob have been involved in a car accident... and they didn't survive."

I saw the phone receiver hit the floor and watched my body collapse next to it. I felt my soul sit down on the floor, more grounded than I had ever sensed. I then felt my spirit being dragged back into my body and the piercing pain I felt in my chest took my breath away. The tears and sorrow poured out of me and I thought the tightness in my throat would suffocate me. My sobs eventually broke through the grip on my throat and I felt I would surely die right here... right now...

But I didn't die. As much as I had wanted to, I didn't die. After an eternity of torment, I lay motionless; tears still running back into my ears but no expression was left on my face. No sobs of a mother grieving the death of her children were announcing themselves through my mouth anymore. I felt lighter. The way it feels when you tell your best friend that you've been hiding a secret -that to your surprise, only made them love you more. The relief of that release was suddenly stronger than my pain. The realization that I was grieving, feeling and moving brought my mind to the conclusion that now I could focus on surviving that which I could not change.

The whole experience was weird to me. As if my mind had taken action as a living breathing thing and forced me into a state of understanding that I would not have looked for on my own. I found that day that sometimes life is about loving yourself more than you love the idea that it can be perfect without doing that. Neglecting who you need you to be should be a criminal charge.

There is so much available to us that we're born into, but we push it aside to tend to the needs of others that we don't yet know how to tend to in our own lives. How do you give something you do not own or understand? How can you offer happiness without feeling sorrow?

I learned the answers on the day my consciousness convinced me that my kids had really died and that now it was okay to move forward... because they never expected me to give up on their behalf.

I should've never expected me to give up on anyone's behalf.

I'm not sure what prompted this entry into this blog based on my experience of life's sometimes brutal ways. Maybe I don't need to know the instigator. Maybe what matters is that I learned. Maybe what makes the difference in today and yesterday is that I am more willing to feel each extreme of every opposing emotion because I know today that how you survive is more important than how you die.

I've died thousands of times in my 31 years. But each death has added beauty to the things and people that I love and I'll die more gracefully from now on if I am able.

I have come to know since my "loss" of my kids that there are a hundred essential things I would've never done for myself, had I taken on the sole responsibility of carrying them to wherever I'd never been. I could've never shown them the things they needed to learn if I hadn't been grabbed by the neck and forced onto a road isolated enough to introduce me to myself and who I wanted to be...

for them...

but most importantly, for me.

Rachel and Jacob are alive and thriving as best they know how in the life their dad has created for them. Karma has begun to spin her awesome web and daddy is learning what it means to experience sacrifice and is now living with the knowledge that his kids are more than empty little shells waiting to be filled with lies about who he can never be. And mom's showing them just how perfect life really is from the distance that was necessary for her to find the room to grow.

I can feel the time drawing nearer when they will come closer and want to know what I've known. They speak of it already with the vocabulary their wisdom allows them. I know now that everything's always been okay.

This is what I once owed and now have come to own.

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