I started blogging on my Camino de Compostella hike 3 years ago. It has become the single, greatest tool in my grief process. Reading and reflecting over the last three years and seeing my heart heal within the raw words I wrote, I get to slowly see myself become whole again. It does something for me that has been unexplainable.
I don’t, for one second, forget this day three years ago. Every day I remember sitting in our room watching her life literally vanish from this world. As I watched, I felt a void in my life grow to a point of crippling proportions. It was as the sun vanished to leave me in a cold dark world.
Every minute of every day, I still think and talk about the last month of Lindy and I’s life together. The guarded barrier she held since I met her, like the Berlin Wall, crumbled to the ground these last three weeks. It was maybe one of the most beautiful moments of our life. It was the culmination of eight years of trying like crazy for me to get to her to understand what unconditional love looked liked. In her final days she finally felt and knew it existed from me to her. I relive and cherish these moments so often.
Without dragging the story out, I started to journal in 2004, one year before I was to meet Lindy. I apparently, in a devastating heartbreak of my own, started to journal. Well, drunken journaling in a New Orleans bar while day drinking. It was me and my friend Jack Daniels, that was. I drank and in anger wrote out what a perfect woman for me would look like should I ever want to put my heart back out there. After that weekend, I lost that journal, only to find it a year after I married Lindy. I opened it up and read it. I was in shock that I described Lindy to a T on those pages.
Two years before I married Lindy, I started to write out my goals and post them on a board in my office. The other night I was cleaning out my attic and I ran across that board.
One of my goals was to have one of my homes on or near the ocean in Southern California. I truly had forgotten about that board and this goal. Yesterday, while driving from Orange County with my fiancé Julie, five hours north to Mammoth Mountain to ski, that board popped into my mind. I shared with her that this moment is a bit surreal.
Now, I am engaged to a Southern Cali girl, in a made for Lifetime type of meeting and story, doing pre-marital counseling out here and I am excited about the plans God would have for us.
Today marks another seminal marker in my journey of grief and life. I will always celebrate Lindys life, like I do everyday now, but today for the first time, I am truly happy and excited about what life has in store for me again. I am getting married to my perfect partner-in-life and new best friend, future mother of our kids, and the one who was truly put in my path to help God redeem me. I am at that stage of recovery that is not the end of pain, but the ability to function with it and let myself reconnect to the happiness I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Lindy is cheering on for me from Heaven. I know she is smiling that I have met the perfect girl for me. My hurt will never be forgotten, it will just start to recede into the background of my life. This is a fact that comes with great tears as I write this. My grief has always kept me close to Lindy. This may be the moment Lindy has been waiting for so that she can finally know I am ok. Me being ok is something I found out recently from one of her dear friends that was very important to her.
I love you sweetheart and you will always be in my heart and thoughts.
2 Responses
I am so happy for you! Reading this at 5:08 AM truly gives me the hope in knowing that everything will come about in due time…I’ve always said, “The me I see is the me I’ll be, and that you’ve got to name it to claim it baby!” I too have grieved and have been recovering from the loss of what I came to believe was my greatest love. The love of my life. For many years now, almost 10, I haven’t dated anyone seriously, maybe had a few dates here and there. I’ve been filled with such grief and sadness, it was debilitating. After almost 15 years, the man that I believed was going to be in my life forever, suddenly left me the summer of ’07. I felt devastated. I was in shock. I’d had surgery on my knee in Feb. and had been on crutches for 5 mos. and leaving me in a time of need for emotional support and also of physical need. I was crushed. ( we had 5 kids and horses too) I’ve come to believe in all the years of my life that divorce is worse than death. In the death of a spouse or loved one you know that your mate is not choosing to leave you because they don’t love you anymore, and worse they leave you for another woman.. or that they’ve simply changed their mind about the commitment they made to you to love you in sickness and health for better or worse for richer or poorer.. Until death do you part..It’s the worst form of rejection I’ve ever felt. I read your words and I know how that kind of love lost feels.To lose the love of your life. I haven’t necessarily given up or have I grown impatient because I am still single. I’ve taken advantage of this time (a long intermission) to reflect, pray and meditate about life. I have done some deep down house cleaning. But before I could do that, I had to see the dirt first. Once I really examined all that needed to be cleaned and cleared away, that was the point in time I felt the beginning of true healing.. I just love it when my house is clean!…I’ve live by Faith and put all of my life’s up’s and downs into the hands of my Heavenly Father, my Heavenly Husband, my Heavenly Best Friend, and My Soul Provider. I have learned to be quiet, patient, and listen to the still small voice. I continue to wait for all things in God’s perfect timing. I too have written in journals for many years, well since I was in 7th grade! It really is interesting when you go back re-read some of those old pages and see just how your life is unfolding in all those mysterious ways. Its pretty wild! I found one the other day that I wrote down in 7th grade, and I’d drawn on the lay out of the farm I wanted to live on someday, and drew out plans for where on the land I wanted my house to be built, where I wanted my barn to be built, and where I wanted a small stock tank. It’s all come true, I live on that small farm…45 years later I am still realizing my dreams! I have that mental image of what my perfect soul mate looks like and I just know that one day he will show up!… Great things happen when we choose our thoughts and words carefully. And when we see and believe in the higher knowing that we all have the power to choose. Good luck to you both and best wishes!. You’re the kind of a guy that makes Julie a very lucky and blessed woman having you to hike through life with! Annette
I don’t know how I missed this reply but it is beautiful. Thank you for sharing. It is funny how life jumps off the pages of journals and becomes real. I believe whole heartedly in journaling. I recent lost my mother in 2021. She journaled everyday of her life both writing down her life but also writing down what she felt God told her. God showed her that my beautiful June, an embryo from my deceased wife and I, they my current wife carried and she knew that the baby would come about and that it would be a girl. I learned that from her journal. So yes, journaling is powerful. God bless you and I hope all is well. You may not see this but thank you for replying.