I would be unforgivingly foolish if losing my mom did not teach me a little something about life. I sat beside her bed in the hospital, feverishly and urgently telling her all of the things I should have been saying for years. I will always be grateful for having that moment, no matter how bittersweet, to tell her how much I love her and appreciate her, and see that smile on her face as she reached for me.
I walked away from that bedside with a massive shift in priorities and attitudes. How could I not?
I have always told my husband that I love him, but this past weekend, I couldn’t get close enough to him. I couldn’t show him enough. It was the first Saturday in over a month that I woke up beside him in our own bed, and I snuggled close, wanted to feel him completely, intimately, against all of me.
I can’t possibly express to him how much he means to me or how much I have needed him these past few weeks, more than I ever have. He has been my safe place, my unwavering support, my everything. He has been there to listen, to hold me, and to remind me — gently but firmly — exactly who I am and how strong I am. He told me recently, “You need to learn to appreciate you like I do,” and I embraced those words and tucked them tightly into my heart.
The last few weeks have been raw, to say the least. It occurred to me one day, with some wonder, that people like my stalker (my husband’s ex-wife) will never know what this feels like, because she is entirely incapable of genuine love and compassion for another human being, even for her own children. The only love she will ever encounter — either giving or receiving — is her own, for herself. Any positive emotions she emits are for appearances only, as part of her manipulative circus act, her elaborate fake life. Anything approaching affection directed toward her stems from pity or is in response only to her fabricated persona and boundless lies, not who she really is.
I don’t ever want to relive the experience of the past few weeks or the agony of losing my mom. But at least all of it is real as hell. All of it is genuine love, authentic emotions, palpable and undeniable. I also have the ability and willingness to hold that searing pain in my hands, examine it, learn from it, derive meaning from it, to be a better person and demonstrate my love thoroughly to everyone I care for, like my husband, my brothers, and do better for them as well as myself.
It would be far more painful for me to be a hollow automaton and a walking forgery. I am grateful I have been able to learn vicariously what not to be, what never to do, to be a truly good person. As difficult as it is, I will accept this heartache and pain and embrace it, because it is fiercely real. It is powerful. It is honest. And that means so very much, because my loved ones fully deserve truth, intimacy, and purity from me. In the end, I would rather deeply mourn the loss of a loved one than never to experience real love at all. I forever choose love, and the grief that comes with it, over merely existing while already dead inside.
Sweat & Sparkle 