Another Dark Night of the Soul

Several years ago, shortly following the death of my mother I wrote the following, in an attempt to process my grief. It is often difficult to identify an emotion, let alone express it in terms that someone else would understand. For too many years, I held things in, much to the detriment of my health and my sanity.

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.