1-Abandoned to Aloneness

7 AM April 5, 2010
When I awake, the first thing I feel is my aloneness. The place where he used to be is empty next to me.  Within me there is an aching, a hole that feels unfillable, a void that feels eternal.  Every morning my thoughts go first to him. 

Where is he? How is he? Does he wake with a piece of emptiness too? Does he feel anything like I do? 

The struggle every morning right now is to not break down completely, or at least to not cry too long. The pain in my heart is a profound aching. There is a squeezing pressure that wants to pour the water from my eyes and calls me to drown myself forever in the sea stretching endlessly before me, taunting me with it’s mesmerizing presence, day and nite. 

Along with the aching, comes the cry to God: the call for some mercy, some other presence to fill the void, to make me whole again, to show me some grace and compassion. This call fills my being and I am hungry for some message, some acknowledgement that I am not really as alone as I feel.

I feel utterly and totally abandoned. Abandoned by love, abandoned by God even. How can anything hurt so much and make me feel as sick as I do? How can this life bring such intense grief at the loss of true love? And of course I know love can't truly be lost, but when the physical presence of that person is gone, the space, the emptiness is dramatically evident. Maybe only the death of a loved one hurts more than this kind of death, I don't really know that piece yet.  I don’t think I want to.

This feels like a death of sorts ending an eight year long, tender, loving relationship as I am now.  I feel like in order to really move on, I have to feel and see something I loved and cherished as dead between us or I can’t totally let go. Some part of me wishes I’d never let myself love so fully, and so deeply. I am angry at myself for completely abandoning my own knowingness that I was giving too much of myself away.  Still another part of me is only grateful for knowing such a sweet love.  I feel blessed that, in truth, it is not dead, but only evolving into something I know not as of yet. I wouldn't change one moment of loving him.   It was my joy to give myself so fully.

Yet, even that knowing doesn’t make it any easier. The knowing doesn’t take away this ache.  It doesn’t have me waking up singing in joy, nor does it allow me to be resting quickly and easefully at night the way I did with his strong arms and peaceful, soothing presence always near by.

Last night the fear of my aloneness came creeping in when I came home to this dark little house tucked up on the hill looking over the sea where I am living in Costa Rica. Fears came sweeping in that some dark intruder was inside, that someone had known he had left and was waiting inside to attack me, hurt me, damage me more. I couldn’t sleep. I found myself lying in bed for hours listening to every little sound and talking myself out of the fear with logic that seemed weak and floppy, but that was actually truth. 

“No one is here to hurt me.  Nothing is different since he left. You are safe here.” “You can rest, you are protected.” Still, the knowingness didn’t subside the fears. I longed for his hand to hold onto as I fell asleep, the way we fell asleep together for nearly 8 years, hands touching softly beneath the sheet. I didn’t sleep til after 2 AM, and over and over my mind flipped between him, and God, between the knowingness that I was safe, and the simultaneous knowingness of my total vulnerability should some crazy man jump thru the window in the middle of the night.  I lay there miserably fenced between the warrior/shaman/priestess knowingness that this is a valuable, good and crucial time for me to grow, and the heartbreak of a woman near 40 who is ready to be with her lifelong partner, to build and grow in life and love together.

Clearly, I am on a new journey; maybe the biggest one yet of my life. I have 21 days of living alone in the jungle by the sea in Costa Rica to create a new life to return to that can inspire me enough to get thru this and want to love and live anew. 

My old life is gone. My beautiful angel who has held me, loved me, comforted me, and been my rock, my stability, my home and my place to run to is gone. The one who always kept me laughing, lite and re-finding grace is gone and I made it so. 

I am alone in the world again at 39, fighting pre-cancerous mutating cells in this little body, with no place to go but inside myself for the strength, answers and guidance of what to do next with my life. On day 5 of the journey, I am simply trying to find the gratitude for this, and in some moments I do indeed feel peace. 

For nearly eight years, one beautiful man has been my sun. He has been the love and light I have revolved around, he was woven deeply into my world and I in his.  Together we had created our own sweet jewel that only he and I truly knew the radiance of. 


I have lived and breathed his life and breath, loving him in a way that I never knew was possible. I gave up almost everything of myself to maintain being with him, and willingly and joyfully as nothing or no one else has ever brought me such peace, joy and comfort as he did. He helped me to heal parts of myself that were shattered and gave me a foundation to move from into the world to start to re-find myself. 

I had very recently begun to actually believe that he would be my partner for many years to come, even for life.  I was just starting to feel that we would build a lifelong future together. He had actually finally won my trust and my faith, after years of my own skeptism that he could really be ready for that, or that I even wanted that. He told me he would take care of me, and I was starting to believe him. He told me he wanted to be with me for many years to come, and I believed him. He even told me that he thought I might be the one, and after years of resisting that that possibility could even exist for me, he had finally convinced me that it might actually be possible that a man could love me that deeply. 

Even before he left just 5 days ago, he was putting hope into me, that maybe someday he’d come back and take care of me, telling me he thought we’d be back together someday. His love has always been there when I doubted. When I wanted to move on, wanted to let go, wanted to run, he'd stand strong, and remind me that he wasn't going anywhere and tell me that we are meant to be together. His love always won me over and after nearly 8 years, it was feeling like we'd made it over a big hump and I had finally surrendered fully to the love and all of it’s challenges.


Yet now, even in spite of all of his wanting to leave me hopeful, I need the hope to die so that I may be able to move on fully with my life, with no attachment to “maybe someday” any longer.  No more false illusions of possibilities, no holding on to anything: I need the death of it for my own closure.

I wanted to die in his arms, I still do. Some part of me already has.

Yesterday I got word that a young man had gone for a walk three days ago and never returned. Friends of mine sent a search party and his body was found in the river not so far from my house. No one knows what happened. He went out for a walk and he never came back. Somehow that hit me hard last nite. The impermanence of this life is so easy to forget. Life is too easy to take for granted.

To expect another day is the way we live for the most part. We all know that life can end at any second, but we don’t really experience what that means until someone passes away, or there is some kind of permanent loss. Death feels so final. Through spiritual wisdom, we know that it is only truly a transition to some other realm that we can’t fully grasp. Yet on the physical level that we associate life with most of the time, it is final. It is a full moving from one experience to another and we go alone. 

So why is it that this aloneness bites so much? Some say we are born alone, but truly I don’t see that as true. We are created from two beings coming together in union, then we develop in the body of our mother. We are birthed, held, nurtured, fed, cared for by others. A human baby is so vulnerable and in need of others to care for it. There is truly nothing alone about being born. We come in fully attached, and already in love with our mothers. We are never alone in the beginning or we wouldn’t survive. Life isn’t meant to be lived alone. "No man is an island."   

We don’t get here without help from other beings, we can’t survive here totally alone, and those who do often end up insane or fanatical because it is not human nature to be solitary beings, it simply isn’t. Humans are, and always have been, social animals who are most healthy when they can love others, share, and commune.