How Can I Help You Say Goodbye?

“Mama whispered softly, time will ease your pain.
Life’s about changing, nothing ever stays the same.

And she said, how can I help you to say goodbye?
It’s ok to hurt, and it’s ok to cry.
Come, let me hold you and I will try.
How can I help you to say goodbye?”

(How Can I Help You Say Goodbye sung by Patty Loveless)

Say good-bye? NO.

How do you say goodbye to a man who touched every corner of your life? A man with whom you grew up and lived for more years than your own parents were married.

His impact was tremendous. Here was a man who loved me unconditionally, who teased me wickedly, who loved our kids in a way my own father never did my sister and me. A man who treated family like friends and friends like family. A man who left the lid up, the cap off the toothpaste and his socks in the floor. A man who could make me laugh and cry all in the same instant.

Say good-bye to more than 30 years of that? NO WAY.

He is the reason that I am who I am today.

Did I set his spirit free? YES.

It would be selfish of me to tie his spirit to me when we travel different paths now. It took time to get there...I was afraid of what would happen if I did. Letting go of those things brought fear that if I lost the pain I also lost the love…that I would lose the essence of HIM.

Yet, in looking back through the filter of hindsight, I now understand that there IS a time for the pain, for the grief and for hanging on. There is a time to recluse yourself and swaddle yourself in thoughts of the life that was.

Obsessed with every scrap of memory that made us…US, for nearly a year I lived cloaked in the past of our burgeoning love, early marriage and the honeymoon years of settling into the life we planned. Writing madly, often in the dead of night, I filled pages of journals with the anguish of loss as well as the joys of memories of our life together. I gathered pictures, poetry (some my own), music and books and immersed myself in dwelling not in this world. I retreated from reality and firmly planted myself into a space and time that no longer was.

Even so I clung to my grief like a shield; the innermost part of me knew I could not continue to live my life in memories…that HE would not want me to close the door and never step foot in the present again. Mrs. Haversham from Great Expectations I would not be. I could not allow myself to become like a dear aunt, who after 11 years, is still as fresh in her grief as was I at the beginning. I could not do that to myself, my children nor the spirit of the man who loved me. 2 years passed before I gained the courage and the strength to do that which I knew I must.

Gathering a portion of his ashes, a few strands of the pony tail he’d cut only a handful of months before he died and a scrap of the hair ribbon he had saved from our first date, I took myself to the secluded mountain top cemetery in Tennessee where his ancestors dwell.

Honoring the native line that runs his blood, sage, juniper and cedar smudge cleansed my own soul and calmed the spirits that walk those mountains. Repeating the words of a poem I wrote him as his ashes sifted to the four winds and the ground around the wild rose growing on his beloved grandfather’s plot, sealed with the salt of my tears, I set his spirit loose.

My Jim no longer walks upon this planet, yet, his spirit soars the universe and his love resides in my heart forever. All I need do is look to our children and our grand to know a true piece of him lives still.

I am not cured, as my friend Josefus would say, but I am OK.