Daryl Wood's Blog

All of a sudden in the midst of learning and growth and writing wise words and making appointments, the earth shifted, and despair consumed me yet again. How could this be? I was feeling so good. I was making plans and getting things done, replying to messages and shredding old papers when suddenly I realized I hadn’t stopped eating for two hours. Like a wild animal I pulled food from the fridge and the cupboard and tried desperately to eat away the growing rage of my emotions without consciously seeing the pattern overtake me. Until it did. And then what?

And then the tears. The deep, heaving sobs of grief that make it hard to breathe and overwhelm me with exhaustion and anguish. And after long, long minutes of wailing I lapsed back into the familiar whimpering, a soft, quiet surrendering to the emptiness in my heart.

There is something about walking along a deserted road and allowing the sometimes faint and sometimes scary loud sounds of mourning to fill the space around me. No one to hide from. No one to answer to. No one to explain the huge tears gently rolling down my cheeks. No one to hear or see the pain etched on my face and heart. This is grief. Raw and honest without the filters so many of us use to protect others from our suffocating sadness and ourselves from whatever we are afraid of hearing from those who love and care about us.

It’s hard to believe that I can live in that ache a few times a day and still laugh at a text message, delight at my nephew’s pictures of his new baby or be fully absorbed in listening to my friend on our long walks. How is it that I can be completely and painfully overcome with suffering and longing for my beloved Doug and yet still take the garbage out, do laundry, wash the dishes, get dressed and bake cookies for my neighbours? How do any of us keep going when the odds seem so strongly against us surviving in the wilderness of loss?

I can only guess that some primal urge within me beckons me to keep going. Nothing in my busy, fearful, overloaded mind can compete with the inner guidance to keep moving towards the light even when I am certain that giving up is the best and only solution to find relief. And there is a light. I can say now that there has always been a light from those first darkest of days when I searched frantically everywhere for my sweet Doug hoping that what I knew was really just a bad dream. The light came from him in the little signals that told me he was watching and listening and praying for me to find the strength to live the life he so badly would have loved to have. And that brings another round of tears knowing he would love to walk with me at another time and place when his life wasn’t plagued with the illness he fought so hard to manage.

So here it is. The unmistakable reality of my journey of grief. There are moments in the day when I find the words to inspire others and bring my decades of teaching to the world. And there are moments in the same day, sometimes in the same breath, when I sink into the most forlorn of places, that ‘other’ place where hopeless and helpless wrap tightly around my fragile self, threatening to squeeze the life out of me. And still, all of a sudden, I am here facing forwards, backwards and inwards if only to be my own witness to what this experience will do to my otherwise organized life.