Transitions

My chest aches. My heart hurts. I wonder sometimes if my age and lack of diligence about my health is catching up to me. I wonder if I am feeling the beginnings of my end. Hard to figure out because my heart is actually broken. The losses keep rolling in, like the tides, with no respect for the beaches' capacity to tolerate or accommodate them. Inexorably, relentlessly, wave after wave of grief. Eroding the sands of the protective reef around my heart. I was tolerating, if not accepting, the unspeakable horror show of my husband's slow demise, but now my beautiful son-in-law seems to be leaving me as well. My heat aches also of course for my my own baby, his wife, but I feel the pain of his withdrawal personally. Another of the many fine men in my life who always always always leave me. At least that's the life lesson I am drawing from all this. Festive pity party up in here? Absolutely. And yet.....as the season softens into spring and the snow melts away to a cold distant memory, my heart is thawing towards my husband. I find myself not so angry with him any more, though, like the last small mound of dirty snow next to our driveway, I still get irritated and impatient with the ravages of his disease. That one small dirty mound of cold is still present, but no longer rules my heart. I feel the inescapable pull of spring's promise and the renewed sense of life force that the budding season allows. Now I feel more sad for him, for his loss. I have been raging for years over the loss this represents for me, and now as I lean back toward him again, my pain is for him, not me.