No one tells you how the story will end, like watching a movie, you guess, assume, and conjure up your own outcome that makes the most sense to you. So many movies leave us puzzled, perplexed, and bewildered, wondering how could the scriptwriter think the audience would leave the theater satisfied with such an ending? You know what I’m talking about, the “What just happened?” “The ending sucks” kind of movies.
Yet life smacks us with these endings to the stories we are living more often than we want to view; instantly you look down and see your heart is in the palm of your hand, you are void of air, and you wonder how you will insert your heart back into your chest.
This was me one year ago, when an instant message asking me for my phone number changed the space of my reality, a phone call to a hospital hundreds of miles away and a voice on the other end speaking the unimaginable, “Your son was in a motorcycle accident, we gave him CPR for an hour but ...” BUT??? There is no but! Shut up, stop talking to me, you are not real, this is not the way this story ends!
As I turned into a mist in my kitchen, I unconsciously handed the tainted voice on the phone to my husband, and the vapor I had now become reappeared outside, screaming his name “Josiah, Josiah, Josiah, where are you, where are you??” Since I had no legs, the ground was my only refuge. Laboring to breathe I could hear a crackling from my hand that now held my heart, shredded.
The earth had shifted, spontaneously expanding my understandings that had vanished.
One by one love began to arrive—siblings, aunts, uncles, father and friends—each one entering with their hand dripping with the shreds of not only their heart but mine as well.
Love has a unique dialect in a crisis and had advised them to hold a piece of mine. As each one of my beautiful children, relatives and friends managed to find my mist, our shreds blended until only one heart could be felt, “HIS.”
One by one I gathered back the ribbons of my heart from theirs, this is my enigma and I needed every ribbon if I was going to survive this unimaginable alteration in the script and not just go with him, which momentarily teetered my thoughts.
How one day can alter perception like no other day has the possibility of doing, leaving you with more questions, and no answers.
What do I do with the tear stained shreds that were once a heart, how do I reshape it and place it back in its proper position, what choice do you have when you had no choice?
All I had believed withered into the unstable earth my weakened bones now lay upon.
I am now unmolded clay on the sculptor’s wheel, but how do I mold and create the next part of my present moment when I am a clay-less vapor? How do I surrender to the sculptor to mold me and move me in the direction I will become, the creation that only dark despair creates?
Grief has a way of sliding through you like no other emotion, shape shifting the current of your DNA.
I felt like a moment was too distant to wander to, I believed I was broken beyond human recognition and that this was going to be my remaining existence.
When you are shredded, however that comes to be, you have a choice. You can absorb, digest, and become--or you can stay defeated, which silences the healing and secrets the rescripting of the docudrama you are now living.
A friend asked me, “What is the gift he left you?” which challenged the alignment of my mind. So I began to question the gift in the shreds, in the ribbons of my heart, in the vaporized clay. I asked myself, what form do you choose to become, and how will you recalculate, reevaluate and respond to this act in your movie? I am now in the scene where I am faced with life at its rawest expression of cruelty, at least this is my initial perception ... this path feels wrong, blurred with deception, the earth is lying to me without words, and if this is not how it’s supposed to end, then I am not at the ending, I am at a pause, an intermission where the actors realign and relationships redefine, including mine with Josiah ...
There it was, LOVE.
Love appeared again, now in the vexed eyes of my children,
“Will she stay or will she go?”
And there was no way I was leaving them, I could feel the two worlds merging, how do I stay with him and be here with them?
My breath now bleeding, I sang out.
“Josiah, it has been too many days, too many quiet moments,
My labored breath awaits your voice, this void with no end,
Awaiting tears that perch my soul”
With ink still wet and without warning,
I heard him!
“Oh Mother of this earth,
I am with you, I hold your heart from here,
Stronger than I could when there, it is I that perch your soul.”
His ginormous Spirit reminding me that he had me, that his presence had just changed form, that he was happy, healthy, healed, and whole now, and that he would guide my way, our way, maybe your way.
I honestly can’t give you a time frame when I reappeared in my body, I am sure I am not all there now, quite possibly, I never will be, I like the place in-between—the merge—but what I have come to know is I can’t be there, unless I am here. Unless I live in Love, I won’t be able to transmute this pain, which is Love on the deepest level.
We have all loved and lost, we have all carried the shreds and gathered the ribbons.
To say I am grateful doesn’t feel right, but it doesn’t feel wrong, just the mere fact that he chose me, that I had him in my body and that his magical being loved me, I am humbled. Gratitude seems too faint an expression.
If you were to ask me, “Raina, if you knew this was part of the script, would you say yes again?” I would answer, “Yes, a million times Yes! Yes to loving him, Yes to knowing him, Yes to the privilege of being his mother, Yes to the magic that is Josiah,” and as my tears stain these pages, I say, “Yes, for the gift he gave me was himself, and I am beyond grateful.”
Now I have form again, and I am being sculpted into something other than what I once was. My ribbons lay upon the sculpture differently yet uniquely still mine—repurposed. And though it may take beyond this lifetime to see the polished performance from this movie, to see the glossy finish, I willingly say,
Yes, polish me Spirit, polish me, Angels, polish me, Josiah.
Let me be Love, let me be light, and let me honor you in my movie because it’s not over.
To love is our greatest gift, to be Love is even greater.
Will you gather the ribbons, will you embrace your enigma, and will you rise with me and call on love to show you the gift? There are some pains so great that others fade in comparison. Choose to be polished, even if you can’t see that you shine, someone else can. I can.
My Heart, My Soul, My Spirit, My Life will never be the same.
It will be Stronger.
Because of Josiah