Looking back at my last blog entry it was really an eternity ago, May 2013. I remember thinking about how important it was to get that blog post up, a mix of stress and need to feel productive and pride and passion. A few days later my husband passed away suddenly on his way home from work, heart failure at the age of 37. I was standing there with our one-year-old son on the sidewalk waiting for him to come home and his car stopped in the middle of the street only a few blocks away when he died. So, just like that, just as Feilpe’s entire life stopped mid-breath, my world came down around me almost three years ago now. I look at something like this marker of time and how my world was before this and now after and… it just takes my breath away, really. It makes me stop. Three years later (forever and ever ago and just a blink of the eye ago) and I am a totally different person.
Sometimes I ramp back up to put just as much importance on a blog post as I could on spending time with my precious son because I know it’s our natural tendency to not be in the wonderment of the mystery of life all day. We would just all be floating around all day in awe. At the same time, I see life in a totally different way now as I do live the day to day. I had about a good year after Felipe died of living in the deepest mystery of what life is, why we are here, what is important, really getting my mind blown with one revelatory realization after the next. I just let it happen. I let all of the illusions of my life from before my husband passed just drop away around me; dreams that I thought would happen, the way that I thought anything would happen, my identity as a wife, a two-parent family, financial securtiy of a partnership, everything that I thought was real that in the moment that Feilpe passed, I was shown were total illusions. I had to grieve each of those layers as they were revealed to me one by one, like: “Oh, I thought this was true about my life that I would grow old with this person and we would live here and there and would play tennis together, and go on these trips and have this house.” We walk around thinking that our world is a certain way but really, in a moment all of that can change. We walk around in our stories and give a LOT of importance to those stories of who we are and what value we place on certain things, positive and negative. The truth is, all that we can ever hold onto is our PRESENT MOMENT. There is really nothing else that we can work from but our now. We have a choice to be completely present right now and feel as much ease, peace, joy and harmony as we want.
I challenge you to notice what you hold as true, fixed, permanent in your life. Where could you benefit from detaching a bit from certain things like feeling frustrated that this one thing is like this. Maybe if you looked at it through a different filter, it could be a totally different story. In that first year of grief, I would watch a lot of documentaries about death and spirtual things but something I found strangely comforting in my sadness was watching tsunami documentaries. It is a shocking and sad realization that people are having as they are often calmly filming on their phone what to them seems like a big, unreal flood and then… it turns into the most life-altering and unfortunately deadly circumstance that noone can ever even fathom. These videos would make me feel connected in my experience to the fact that every single one of our realities that we live on a daily basis are so fragile. How we get to work, what we eat, resources we have, the people we see everyday… nothing is static and unchanging and to be taken for granted. We must have so much gratitude for the things that we do have in our lives today, without fearing the worst that can happen by any means, but by living so fully in the moment that we can relish the time that we DO have with our loved ones. We can be so at peace in the “STORY” of who we are without being so attached to it that we can’t adapt, mold to the shifting tides and ultimately, be more present to what our life is giving us right now in this moment.
Thank you for reading my story.