life

I feel really good so I need to write it down here. I feel alive. I feel excited. I feel like I'm being and doing exactly what she would have wanted and expected me to do. I have this really odd feeling that she feels that she set me free. I don't know if that's coming from inside, or coming from her, but it's what I'm intuiting. Our relationship was long, intense, challenging, and full of longing. For the last years, we both struggled to be who we were while being together. We both struggled with her addiction and illness/poor health. I loved her deeply and intensely, but in the last years it turned into something different. I was committed to her and she to me, but it became a caregiving situation for me and she (I think) felt a dependency that she was not comfortable with. I think she and I were so intertwined, so intensely connected, that it was beginning to be too painful and something had to happen. I read her journals, from years past, and she always had an intuition that she would not be on this earth for a long time. She knew that her time was short. I felt her looking at me sometimes, in the last two years, and she saw my health and my being 10 years younger, and she would sometimes comment on it. I knew then that she felt she was holding me from something. I would assure her that I was ok where I was and that I accepted her and all of her illness and dis-ease. But, it was a darkness. I loved her with all my heart and would have probably been with her for the rest of my life, if she were alive. But, I feel that her passing was a gift for both of us and I'm grateful for it. For her, it was freedom from the human shell that she inhabited so that her spirit and soul could move on in beauty and without the weight of dis-ease and suffering. For me, it is freedom from the weight of caregiving and the dysfunction of addiction and someone else's suffering.

So, I feel like I am shedding all of it, slowly but surely. I can feel life. I am alive and healthy and young. My body feels strong and my spirit feels free. The experience of caring for a dying loved one and then letting them go has changed me profoundly. I'm grateful for her allowing me to be a huge part of her journey in that way. It was all done with love. It was all done with compassion and acceptance. I am learning how to be quiet. How to sit with my SELF. How to just BE present. I see others around me and I know that I don't have to give up myself for anyone ever again, and I never will. I have learned about relationship, about partnership. I have learned that it's ok to be alone and that it's ok to like someone but not have to change who I am for them. I feel confident in who I am and love my life. I also love to love. I love passion and sex and relationship. But, I'm excited to create love in a different way. To hold back, to create relationships without anxiety, to built up to intensity rather than starting there, to pay attention to those little things that I might not like rather than ignoring them because of wanting, to be assertive and speak my truth and tell my story.

Life is good. I will hold her close, in a special place, and will think of her and all of the things she taught me for a long time. She and I are still connected, and always will be. But, I know that she is smiling at the energy she feels coming from me. I know she would be proud of where I am and where I am going. I hope that where ever her spirit is, that it is truly happy, joyous, and free.