November 2008
I find that I have descended into yet another ‘dark night of the
soul’ in which there is no solace, only suffering, sorrow and silence. I have
sat within that silence and searched the depth and breadth of my mind, heart
and soul. Sadness, grief, anger, remorse, confusion, despair, loneliness and
isolation, old familiar feelings, like long departed friends, gradually take
positions on the floor of my psyche. I cannot evade them nor deny their
existence. I cannot run though I want to. Instead, I acknowledge them, enter into
that darkness and respect that they have come for a reason.
I have sat with them as the days have turned to weeks without words
of expression until I finally ask, to none of them in particular, the reason
why they are here and what it is I have to learn. I suspect a profound change
in my person. And in the process of
becoming the woman who I am meant to be. I cannot help feeling both the loss
and the presence of both my mother and my Nanny simultaneously.
I feel as though I were again, within the belly of the whale, my own
private prison, where there is no light, only darkness and shadows. I must face
the void and work my way through it. Though I cannot know with absolute
certainty how long this will take.
It has been months since these intensely painful and dark emotions
have overwhelmed me. The mute silence is both deafening and maddening. Though I
pray frequently and fervently, the dark night remains. I cannot suppress this
experience or deny these feelings, for to do so, would surely plummet me into
madness and perpetual despair. And I cannot live like that, not anymore.
Though presently,
it feels as though God Himself has turned his back and not answered my prayers.
I trust that He shall make both His presence and His will known to me in His
own good time.
I have been reading quite a bit. I have literally hundreds of books
in my personal library. While reading Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS, I was
particularly taken with the following passage:
“Society, as we have constituted it,
will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains
fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide,
and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the
night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling,
and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track my hurt; she will
cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
I have always found solace in nature, in books and in prayer. Strange
how my full name means “gentle bitter waters” and how I can so readily relate
to that passage. There are, as you know, hurts that only God may touch. There
are wounds that given sufficient time may heal, but there are others that never
fully heal.
I have faced significant losses in my life and no one is immune to
sorrow. I have learned as Ernest Hemingway wrote “I am strong in the broken
places” and survived things I previously thought would utterly defeat me or
spiral me into lunacy and darkness indefinitely. But these experiences have only
served to make me a stronger, more compassionate, tolerant and understanding
human being.
There are no words to heal the broken hearted. The pain may dull
over time but it never completely disappears. This sorrow consumed me when I
lost my best friend, my grandmother and finally my mother. Words cannot fully
express what torture mom went through, or the sense of relief that I felt when
she died as she was in so much pain. Words cannot fully convey my suffering with
her loss and in being the only child unable to be with her when she took her
last breath.
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