Month: March 2022

The aftermath of the death of a loved brings something unexpected…..crystal clear vision on some things you couldn’t see before. It’s funny how that happens because so many things during that time are a blur because your grief is blocking a great deal. I think this happens because the things you can now see for what they really are end up being the very things that have no place in your life. Whether it be a person or situation, your new-found clarity guides you to clear them away to protect you.

There have been a handful of people who’ve really shown their true colors to me since Kenny died. Some of them I I already knew deep down how they were, but the empath in me wanted so badly to see the good in them. Some completely blindsided me by what they did. I never saw it coming. Treating a person so awfully who’s in such a vulnerable state like I’ve been in since Kenny’s death is just disgusting. The actions of all of them were quite shocking but I needed to see them. Sometimes people just aren’t who you thought they were all along.

Some of the situations that have presented themselves to me had to happen so I’d learn the very important lesson from experiencing them. I can now say there is a list of things that I will never do again because I did them and they blew up in my face. I’m the one who pulled the pin on the grenade so ultimately I’m responsible. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If you do what you did, you’ll get what you got. The moral here is do something different so you don’t get the same result as you did all the other times before.

The above things aside, I’ve also been shown the people and things that do belong in my life. They are the ones that I’ll nurture so they continue to grow and evolve into even better versions of what they were before. These are the people and things that I don’t need to wear rose colored glasses to pretend they’re good for me. These are the keepers…..all the rest are the discards. Death doesn’t just take away the living. It also takes away what needs to die in the life of the ones who are left behind.

During the calm, happy periods of our lives we aren’t motivated to change. Why would we be? Things are going great and why would we want to ruin the smooth sailing? The downside to this is that we don’t experience any growth during these calm times. After a while, we stagnate. Nothing good comes from being in that state. It’s only during the storms of our lives that we grow.

Storms are powerful and they very often bring great destruction. A tornado tears across the land, obliterating everything in its path. As it passes over the soil it rips it open and exposes what’s underneath. What may have been soil that was dying off is now regenerated because the healthy soil is brought to the surface.

A hurricane barrels across the vast ocean with such force that it reaches down to the darkest depths and churns up what’s down there, bringing it closer to the surface. What was once dying from no sunlight is now given a second chance to thrive because of the storm.

I’ve used this metaphor many times with people over the years to explain how the storms we encounter in our lives can be beneficial to us. Even in the most horrible and destructive storms comes growth we wouldn’t have experienced had that storm not shown up at our door.

I’m so lost in the storm I’m in now I can’t see through to the others side of it. I’ve been trapped in the middle of it for over five months now, from the moment I woke up to Kenny having a cardiac arrest in the bed beside me. I didn’t know when I went to bed the night before that our lives would never again be the same in just a few short hours. In the blink of an eye, everything changed…..everything.

This storm is like no other I have ever encountered. It rages inside of me all day, every day. I don’t get any reprieve from it while I sleep as it’s taken control of my dreams. I see Kenny’s face behind my closed eyes many nights and the dream is never a happy one. When I wake up in the morning I’m exhausted because I feel like it’s been one long emotional wrestling match in my subconscious mind all night.

At the end of most days I’m left feeling battered like a little wooden boat tethered to the dock that’s been beaten apart by the rough water. I feel like I lose another piece of me every day and I wonder if I can ever reclaim the parts of me that have been lost.

I’ve lost the ability to speak up for myself and have allowed people to walk all over me. This in itself is its own tragedy as I had just finally found my voice the year before after living my entire life prior to that without having ever found it. Things I once cared about it, I don’t anymore. Conversely, things that weren’t so important before are very much important now.

This storm has taken its toll on me in all ways…..emotionally, mentally, and physically. I look in the mirror and the face that I see looking back at me is so different than the one prior to October 8th. Sometimes I wonder if the reflection I’m seeing is really me. I’m wearing my grief and trauma like a mask and I can’t take it off. There are lines in my face that weren’t there before that awful morning. It looks like someone made deep cuts into my face with a knife and the lines are the scars left behind.

My clothes fit more loosely now because grief is the most effective weight loss program you never wanted to be on. Everyone always wants to be thinner but this isn’t the way to attain that.

I don’t want to be in this storm. I want it to go away and never come back again. I want to forget it ever existed. But, it won’t go away, not yet at least, because this storm has its purpose in my life. It has lessons to teach me that I’ve needed to learn for a long time. It has growth to facilitate inside me, whether I like it or not, and truthfully, I don’t like it. I want to skirt the edges of this storm as fast as I can, like a child that runs through a dark hallway as close to the wall as they can to get away from the shadows and the scary, unknown things that hide in them.

But, again, I cannot skirt around this storm. I have no other choice but to go right through it. I have to endure all the pain and suffering and turmoil of it so I can conquer it. The only way is straight through it…..there is no other way.

I often wonder if I get through this storm how things will be on the other side of it. Will my life be so dramatically changed from what it is right now? Will I even be the same person as I was before this storm? Will I ever feel happiness again? What lessons will I have learned and how will I have grown? The answers to these questions don’t lie in the outer limits of the storm, but on the other side of it…..after I’ve gone right through the middle of it.

We often get so lost in our own pain and grief when our loved one dies that we forget that other people are hurting, too. Our pain places us in a vacuum of sorts where all we know is what we are feeling ourselves. It’s like having tunnel vision where we can’t see anything going on in the peripheral. Our own pain is front and center and the only thing we can see. But, we have to step away from that tunnel vision and recognize that others are experiencing their own levels of pain and grief. Sure, it’s not the same kind of pain and grief I’m experiencing from losing my husband, but their pain and grief is still a very real thing and hurts them just as much as mine hurts me.

I do step outside of my own pain to see the pain my adult children are still suffering from losing their dad way before the time they should have. I see the sadness and frustration of my 4 1/2 year old grandson who still doesn’t quite grasp why his Papa who “lives in the clouds up in Heaven” can’t come down here with us. I think that’s the thing that breaks my heart the most. Emory will only remember his Papa through pictures and videos. No child should lose their beloved grandparent that young. It just isn’t fair.

I was able to step completely away from my tunnel vision a few days ago and really see and understand how others outside of myself, my children, and grandson are hurting from Kenny’s unexpected death. My oldest friend in the world, who knew Kenny just as long as I did, broke down and cried over his death. She told me that he was the only male friend she’d had for that long and now he was gone. Kenny didn’t care for a few of the friends I had in the past but he did like this friend a lot. He would have done anything for her because he loved her and really valued her friendship. The three of us had a lot of good times together over the years and I hate like hell that there won’t be anymore memories made from us being together.

Kenny did a lot of carpentry work at her house over the years and she completely trusted him. There’s a stereotype about contractors that you can’t trust any of them and he ran into that with customers many times over the years. He never fought that battle with my friend because she knew Kenny wouldn’t try and take advantage of her. She called him many times to ask how much this or that would be and she always knew he would be truthful with her. She said that her go-to person was gone and what was she going to do now? I told her I completely understand that. There were several “Damn it Kenny! Why did you have to go and die and leave us?!” spoken between the two of us on the phone that night. I’ve said that very same thing myself so many times since he died that I’ve lost count.

My friend was at the hospital with us and saw everything that happened to Kenny with her own eyes. She stood next to his bedside and saw him lying unconscious there in the ICU, hooked up to a mass of beeping machines. She saw him slipping away from us and she pleaded with him not to, just like the rest of us all did. I do remember seeing her cry when she saw him but in the moment it didn’t all register with me. I thought at the time she was crying for him, for me, our children and grandson. I didn’t realize until we had our long phone conversation a few days ago that the tears she cried then and now were also for her losing her longtime friend who she loved like a brother. She lost someone she loved…..just like we did.

I cried on the phone with my friend because she was hurting and I didn’t want her to hurt. We cried together because there will never be another Kenny in our lives like the one we had in him. I cried because I felt her pain instead of mine and it was so terribly awful. I didn’t think it was possible for my heart to break any more than it already had, but it did that night on the phone with her.

That phone conversation was very important. It allowed me to separate myself completely from the ever present pain and grief that has lived inside me for five months, if only for a few hours. The tunnel vision faded away briefly and I was able to see all that was happening outside of it, which was other people besides myself trying to crawl through their own pain and grief of losing their loved one.

My dad told me this one thing about a year before he died and it is so very true……just because what that person over there is going through isn’t as bad as what you’re going through, it doesn’t mean that their thing doesn’t bother them just as much as yours bothers you. It means that the mountains in front of us we’re trying to climb are all the same size to each of us. The other people who lost Kenny are hurting just as much as I am and I need to remember that. Their mountains are just as hard for them to climb as the one I’m trying to conquer myself.

So, on the last day of last year I had something come to the my doorstep that I wasn’t expecting, especially after the events of the prior three months in the aftershock of Kenny’s sudden and unexpected death. A friend of mine who’s an author of several books sent me a message and asked if I would like to be one of the contributing authors in her upcoming collaborative book. She had written and published two collaborative books already and two more in the series were on the table. I told her I would love to be a part of her book but I didn’t know how or what that would entail on my end.

She gave me the info on the book and told me there was a financial investment in getting it published. I knew I could write the chapter as writing has always come so easily to me since I was a young girl. The financial investment part was a block for me as I did not have that money to spare. Since Kenny died things have been very hard financially, and I did not know where my portion of that financial investment could be pulled from.

My friend said one thing to me—“Write the chapter. The money will come if it’s meant to be”.

So, I did. The words came so easily it surprised me. I sent the chapter to my friend and she liked it. I told her I still didn’t know where the money was going to come from for my investment in the publishing process. She told me a story of how years ago when she was really struggling financially someone left $1000 in her mailbox. She said she never found out who it was but it really made a difference in her life at the time. She repeated to me again that if this was meant to be the money would come.

I ruminated over this for weeks. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to be able to afford this. I had a little bit of money put back from after Kenny died but it wasn’t much more than I needed for this. If I took the leap and made the investment I literally would have just a few hundred dollars left.

As the weeks went by I kept getting nudges from above to do this. I pushed them back at first but they kept coming. They got harder and harder to ignore. I talked everything over with both of my children and they were in support of whatever I chose to do. I finally made the decision to go ahead and make the investment to have my chapter included in the upcoming book as this would open a lot more doors for me as a writer.

I let my friend know that I made the decision to go ahead and do this. A few days later she sent me a message and told me that a benefactor had come forward to scholarship most of what my financial investment would be. She did not tell me who it was and I did not ask. I feel like I had to make the decision myself to go ahead and do it for whoever this person(s) was to come forward and offer that scholarship. The decisions that we make in life change the trajectory of how things play out for us and I believe that’s what happened here.

I covered the rest of the financial investment myself, which was a fraction of what it would have been had no one sponsored me. This secured my chapter being included in the book. It’s going to be published in June. The first two books in the series went to the best sellers list in their genre within hours. This book will follow the same path.

This happening has been the ONLY thing that has made me feel hopeful about anything since Kenny died. None of this would have come about if he was still here because all of the writing that I have been doing since he died brought me to this point. From the greatest pain I have ever experienced in my whole entire life came writing so powerful that grief was the only thing that could facilitate it.

I’ve had many people come and tell me that what I’ve been writing has helped them so much. I’m truly thankful that my words are having a positive effect on others. There’s a saying that goes “Stay in your lane”. What that means is to be and do what you’re familiar with. THIS is my lane. This is what I was sent here to do and this is my life’s purpose…..to write and to help others heal.

Kenny’s hands are all over this whole thing. I truly believe with every fiber of my being that he is the one (along with the Creator) that is orchestrating all of it from the other side. He knew for years how much I loved to write, and how it’s been a lifelong dream of mine to be a published author. He’s still looking after me and taking care of me from the other side of the veil, just like he always did in our 35 1/2 years together.

Thank you, Kenny, for bringing this opportunity to my doorstep. You were (and always will be) such a blessing in my life and I am eternally grateful that our paths crossed so many years ago. My love for you will never die and even though we are separated in the physical form I know that you are still right there beside me like you always were. Thank you for making my lifelong dream come true and for guiding me to what is in my highest good. I love you to the moon and back, forever and ever, and I’ll see you when it’s my time to join you over there.

Love,

Lisa