Closer to the Sky
More than a decade lay between me and my last visit to the top of this hill, but its beauty hadn’t lessened: New England fall colors surrounded us on three sides, the horse barn and pasture were still nestled just below, and the smell from the cows living on the other side occasionally wafted our direction, all just as I remembered. I loved the wind up there, closer to the sky. I’d missed the scenery, and I was grateful to share it with an out-of-state friend.
Despite my fondness and desire to return to this place, a feeling of loss was bubbling up – a sort of emptiness in the gut and a hastening of my thoughts. I warned my friend that something might be coming up, and as a PathLights team member, her immediate response was, “Take off your shoes.”
So there we stood, surrounded by fall oranges and reds, our toes buried in the grass, and I looked around at this place where a major part of my life had begun. My friend, a caring presence, created space for however much I was willing to share while I grounded myself in the earth.
I didn’t say much. In fact, I don’t even remember the few words I did speak, and my tears lasted only a moment. But I do know that in that moment, my recent losses faced me more viscerally than I had allowed until that point.
I’d only meant to share a gorgeous autumn scene with my friend, who’d been excited to experience the season on her visit. What I realized instead is that I’d needed to revisit this place, and I’d needed a caring presence with me when I did so. I truly believe that some part of me knew that going to this spot, with this friend, was something I needed to keep moving forward on my journey through grief.
That particular hill, on the northeastern edge of my undergraduate campus, held important memories. It was where my now soon-to-be ex-husband took me on our second date. It’s where we crawled into the privacy of a hollowed-out bush and found an honest-to-goodness corncob pipe. It’s where many of our walks, from my nineteenth to my twenty-first year, began. It’s where he once made a horrible joke about “baaaaad” sheep as we walked by the sheep enclosures and where we ended a muddy hike with him giving me a piggy-back ride because I’d worn my Chucks instead of boots.
It was also where that relationship, in which I’d endured emotional and verbal abuse for much of the past thirteen years, began.
This made that moment of return difficult to parse. I felt confused and not a little lost as feelings of grief crept up on me.
Looking back, I understand I was facing not one, but two losses, because loss can be multi-faceted. In the week leading up to this moment, I’d wondered if I was truly ready to end the marriage, instead of maintaining my original goal of reconciliation through separation. I was facing the loss of a marriage, yes, but it was a loss that I’d forgotten to acknowledge was two sided. Some days, I felt frozen and adrift as I tried to grapple with it. Up to this moment, I’d spent much of my time and energy retroactively facing the multitude of big and small losses that I’d felt while enduring the abuse and attempting to make the relationship work. I was angry over my damaged sense of self-worth and the disruption of my closest relationships as a result of the marriage. Those losses felt heavy, though at the same time, the anger helped me maintain forward momentum.
In the place where it all began, I had to face one more fact: I was losing the man I’d loved. I didn’t want to be with him anymore, no. I saw now how deeply he had scarred me. But I had loved him, once. I had planned a future with him. As I stood in the spot where he’d charmed me and made me feel cared for all those years ago, as I recalled those golden memories of long conversations and my first love, I realized it was time to face this other loss. It may have begun years before, as the emotional abuse ramped up, but I had to face it now. I’d lost the man I thought I knew, and I was grieving.
And it was okay. That may have been the most terrifying part. I had to admit that despite my anger, and despite his mistreatment of me, I was still sad to lose him. For a while, it felt as if admitting such a seemingly out of place fact would take away from my pain. But it doesn’t. Loss is complex, and so are relationships. I have some beautiful memories with this man, and I can be grateful for those while still protecting myself and honoring the too-long list of hurts I endured. Admitting to love doesn’t take away from my narrative of pain – it is part of that pain and an integral part of my story. Walking through loss is difficult, but acknowledging the truth of its complexity and integrating that truth into our narrative can help us begin the process of healing and take care of our own needs.