Love and Loss – Volume One

PROLOGUE I was twenty-one years old when I graduated from college and embarked on a great adventure. Armed with only my diploma and one steamer trunk of belongings, I set out to begin a new job in a strange, distant land. I was exhilarated, anxious to see and learn and experience new things. I loved my new home, but expected to stay only a couple years and then move on. I also expected to remain single and independent. I had such high standards and expectations for a life partner that I figured I would never marry, never find a man who could live up to my impossibly high standards. Maybe I would have a boyfriend from time to time, but no commitments. Within weeks of my arrival in my new home, I met the man I would marry, the love of my life, Louis. There were many obstacles to our love, many social and cultural differences, but our glorious connection as star-crossed lovers was undeniable, and all the obstacles were finally overcome. Our shining path of destiny was clear. After a 7-year courtship, we were married. Then, after a 7-year marriage, Lou died. My grief was devastating, sending me into a dark abyss. With Lou’s death I came to know that my marvelous adventure with him was not just a finite earthly journey, but also an infinite spiritual one. In an effort to heal my broken spirit, I began to spew my thoughts, feelings and revelations into a journal – a spiritual journal, a cathartic chronology of my quest for healing and restoration. This book is taken from that journal, my travelogue through life, love, loss, and eternity. PART 1 Love and Loss June 1986 – October 1989 When Lou and I fell in love, we felt as if we were separate from the world, in our own realm, free from the bounds of space and time. We found refuge in each other and gladly shut out the rest of the world. We relished our joy as we freely chose to soar beyond worldly cares in our speeding spaceship built for two. We were exhilarated. We were synergistic; indeed, one flesh and one spirit, a relationship with a life of its own, elevated in glory above the lives of the two individuals, existing in a plane above all else. Then Lou died, and the joyride came to a sudden, screeching halt. It was as if our spaceship crashed into a wall and I was hurled into a strange, scary void. I was again separated from the world, but in a different way. This time it was a nightmare. I was solitary, isolated, involuntarily separated from everyone and everything else, not traveling as the captain of my ship, but as a hostage in a runaway vehicle; disoriented, out of control, with no guideposts, no frame of reference. Imagine the earth suddenly stopped in its daily rotation. Everything on earth would be hurled into space. That’s how I felt. In spiritual agony, unable to help myself and no one able to help me or even hear my cries. Bounding directionless into infinity in mortal, perhaps eternal, agony. Even God was unable or unwilling to come to my aid. I visited hell. Time does not heal all wounds; it simply covers them with a band-aid. I have been told that I will be stronger for this experience. Baloney. Like a cracked wooden beam, I can be patched and glued back together, perhaps looking good as new, but the flaw remains under the coat of new paint, and the original strength is irretrievably lost. I have also been told that God never allows a person more trouble than he or she can handle. More baloney. The prisons, mental institutions, and graveyards are filled with people who cracked under unmanageable pressure and pain. I almost joined them. True healing requires treating the underlying disease. Getting my spiritual health back is as slow and arduous as trying to pull my small, damaged spaceship out of a black hole. Many days it takes all my strength just to avoid being sucked in even deeper. Whether I am truly abandoned or not is irrelevant to the source of my fear and pain. My perception of hell and spiritual abandonment, real or not, is enough to scare me to death. Intellectual, philosophical and religious approaches to the probable existence of heaven are of no use. It was on a deep spiritual level that my sanity was attacked, and so my salvation must come at that same level. In the absence of an equal perception of a heavenly alternative, my fear remains, and I remain vulnerable. I know what I need to quell my fears. I have experienced the highest of earthly joys and the deepest of earthly sorrows. I have, in the darkness of my despair, glimpsed the horror of hell. Now, if only I could catch a similar glimpse of heaven, I could put hell into a proper perspective. I would know that I am not, after all, spiritually abandoned in a sea of pain. Holy Spirit, where are you? I am not really any more helpless than anyone else. I have simply been forced to face my helplessness more directly than most. In fact, all creation is in the same state – from the plankton in the sea, lofting on waves, tides, and currents, constantly moving, but powerless to direct its course in a turbulent sea; to the mighty redwood, tall and strong, but equally powerless in its inability to move one inch from the spot on which it stands. We humans, in blissful ignorance, believe we have the wisdom, knowledge, and strength to move where we chose, think what we wish, and chart our own destiny. Oh, how I wish I could rejoin the masses who know not otherwise.