It’s been just over 16 months since Kenny died. I spent most of that time in a deep pit of grief and despair over his sudden and very unexpected death. It was an ugly place to exist inside of, and I’d never wish that on any other person, not ever. At the first anniversary of his death, I made the decision to not unpack my bags and live in that place for the rest of my life. I just could not do it. I decided to move onto a place of full acceptance that he was gone and to go forward living my life the best that I could and be as happy as I was able to be.
I’ve spent these last four months in heavy introspection of the twelve months prior to that. I haven’t even written any blog posts during this time as I’ve been busy dissecting and analyzing every bit of this journey through the grief process. Some things were obvious to me, right from the beginning, but one thing did not become crystal clear to me until just recently. That realization was this; that in order to put myself back together again, I had to let my grief break me apart.
As much as I tried to resist that breaking apart, in the end I had no choice but to allow it. I had to completely surrender to that breaking apart to be able to start putting myself back together again. I learned that the reassembling of myself would be different from the me that I was before I traveled through the grief process. The old me died the same day that Kenny did, and there was no resurrecting her. How could I ever really be the same again? It just wasn’t possible as Kenny took parts of me that belonged only to him when he died and there’s no way to retrieve them. Those lost parts of me live eternally with him, up in the clouds in Heaven.
In putting myself back together I discovered there were new pieces that emerged from the journey I had taken. I picked up those new pieces as I traveled along that dark path. At first those pieces were grabbed ahold of by my bloodied fingers as I crawled along, inch by inch, desperately trying to find my way forward without the person I didn’t know how to live without. I feel like the majority of my new pieces came during that time I was on my hands and knees on what felt like an uphill road paved with broken glass.
In time I was finally able to rise up and walk again, but not without the deep scars left behind by the slow, painful crawl. As time went by the broken glass didn’t hurt as bad as it did before because I had made some peace with its existence. It wasn’t until I was able to stand up that I could see that there was a tiny light off in the distance, one that I couldn’t see while crawling on the ground.
During these last four months of looking back at my journey, I saw that the new pieces of me I picked up replaced some of the pieces I lost. They didn’t fit exactly like the old pieces did, but they aren’t supposed to as they aren’t the same by any means. In the process of merging the new pieces of me with the old I had to find a way to bind them together into a new whole.
In Japan there is an ancient form of art called Kintsugi where broken pottery is repaired with gold and transformed into a new work of art. Each broken piece is visible because of the veins of gold running throughout the pottery. The gold fuses the broken pieces together and makes them one strong piece again, whereas before the shattered pieces were weak.
The practice of Kintsugi shows us that something broken can be put back together again, even if the pieces aren’t all there. It shows us too that the new pieces that fill in the parts that were lost can make it even more beautiful than before. Kintsugi teaches us that there is still value in something even if it’s broken. We just have to want to make the repair.
My takeaway in these last four months is that the me that was shattered into a million tiny pieces when Kenny died was able to be put back together again, but in a different form than before. But in order to do so I had to first allow myself to be completely broken apart by my grief. I then took all the broken and fragile pieces and wove them together with the new pieces of me I collected on my journey. The result was the birth of the new me where the scars from the breaking apart are what holds me together.