Images

Sometimes the grieving is soggy and messy  - you probably know the kind. Sometimes it's like a cold, hard, heavy stone. It just sits quietly and heavily inside, leaving no room for anything else.

In the early days the image came often to me of a big red gash, running right through me. The whole of my insides felt - well, if you want to know - ripped and bloodied. (Yes I guess I am quite bloody on the inside). Someone commented to me the other day that things are raw for me - yes that's exactly it, this pain is red and raw.

I read on the website of a young widow that grieving of this kind is like carrying a king size mattress around on your back everywhere you go. She's right - I couldn't have put it better myself. The weight is so heavy sometimes it's hard to keep on walking. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes it crushes you to the floor.  

And while we're here, another image that often comes in to my mind seems to involve a cliff face and my fingernails. It's not an image I choose, it just seems to be there. I guess it is about survival. I'm holding on to something (life? sanity?) with my fingernails. I am clawing my way back (perhaps one day there will be movement) to something with my fingernails. To happiness? To normality? To healing perhaps. It seems to me there is no other way to find healing but by clawing my way to it. To be able to have a conversation with Kent would help fast track it (I keep saying God should have arranged once a week phone calls), as would some other, harder to define impossibilities. But there is nothing available, so my fingernails will have to hold on, and sometime start inching their way up the cliff. I hope there is a plateau up there somewhere.