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This Particular Feeling…

Posted on: May 17, 2017 | Posted by: Alison Miller

Emptiness.

It seems this word is the one that best describes my life since I dealt with the trauma stemming from Chuck’s death.

It was difficult, when I sought trauma therapy, to accurately describe why his death so traumatized me.

His hospice time, and the drama involved in that, though I very intentionally shielded him from the drama.  There’s always drama when someone dies, in one way or another.  Family dynamics, right?

Watching him choke to death…definitely trauma inducing.

Saying goodbye to this man whose very breath was my breath…trauma inducing.

The intensity of the words thrown at me after his death, that made me doubt for a second, whether I’d known the man I lived with for 24 years…there was lots of trauma involved in that.  Not from the words themselves, but even the vague nano-thought that I’d doubted him…god, that was hugely traumatizing to me.

But I underwent EMDR and Tapping and bi-lateral brain stimulation, along with talk therapy, and that took the trauma from inside my chest where a meat slicer had lodged itself, and set it outside my body.  It enabled me to breathe a tad more easily.

Except when I don’t.  Breathe, that is.  But, at least when I do breathe, I can take a fairly deep breath without my lungs feeling as if they’re being sliced into pieces.

And now, building steadily since the trauma took a hike, there is emptiness.

Huge emptiness inside of me.

What was difficult to explain to the therapist is that the trauma that isn’t gone, that can’t go away, is living without him.  That is traumatic to me.

The trauma of that leaves an empty void inside of me.

Huge big massive emptiness.

I combat it daily, filling my world with pink, and pushing myself to engage with my surroundings.  I do that, and have done it, every damn day, since I went on the road.

And the thing is…all of what I do is genuine.

I really like the people I meet on the road, or at the temporary jobs I take.  The hugs I get, the hugs I give, they are so meaningful to me.  Everything I do is real and heartfelt and keeps me here on this earth.  I deeply love my kids and my grands, my siblings, my friends.

All of the pink around me means something.  If I hadn’t gone pink as I have, I would have disappeared, and I know it. I could have disappeared so easily.  Maybe not physically, but in all the ways that matter.

Instead I immersed myself in pink.  I’ve given space, and continue to give space, to the grief, but I’ve also given huge space to the Love that Chuck left behind for me. 

It’s what I know to do.

But, still…the emptiness that is the other shade of the pink and the Love.

What else do I need to do to make myself not so empty? What is the fucking magic formula?

I don’t even know if I’m using the correct word when I say emptiness….maybe it’s another world entirely.  I don’t know.

I just feel so fucking empty, and my world feels so colorless without Chuck in it.

And I know beyond knowing that I’m not the only widow who feels this.

Do you feel this emptiness too?

Categories: Uncategorized

About Alison Miller

My beloved husband Chuck died while we were full timing on the road. We’d rented a condo for our stay in southern CA, and I had to leave 3 weeks after his death. All I knew at that time was that I had to find a way to continue traveling on my own, because settling down without him made me break into a cold sweat. I knew that the only place I’d find any connection to Chuck again was out on the roads we’d been traveling for our last 4 years together. I knew nobody out on the road, I knew grief was a great isolator, and I knew I had to change the way I traveled without him, to make it more emotionally bearable for me. So I bought a new car, had a shade of pink customized for it, bought a tiny trailer and painted the trim in pink, learned how to tow and camp, and set out alone. My anxiety was through the roof, and all I knew to trust was the Love that Chuck left behind for me. I found Soaring Spirits early on, thank god, and the connections I made through SS helped ground me to some extent. I needed to know that other widow/ers were out there in my world, because I felt so disoriented and dislocated. Through Soaring Spirits, as the miles added up, my rig taking me north, south, east and west, I found community. I found sanity…or at least I learned that if I was bat shit crazy, I was in good company, and realizing that ultimately saved my sanity. PinkMagic, my rig, is covered with hundreds of names of loved ones sent to me by my widowed community, and I know it isn’t visible to the naked eye, but I’ll let you in on a secret…she actually illuminates Love as I drive down the many roads in our country, and I can see it through my side view mirror. Love does, indeed, live on~

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