Waiting Quietly For an April Time

It’s been three years and two months and two weeks since the death of my life mate / soul mate. It’s been a rough time for me, working through the pain of his death and our separation, adjusting to life without him, learning to think of him with gladness instead of sadness, searching for new ways of being and new reasons for living, realizing that he is he and I am I and we have separate paths in life.

Every once in a while now, beneath the bleak frozen ground of grief, I can feel the first green stirrings of hope, maybe even a promise of new life.

These feelings are right on time. Everyone I have talked to who has dealt with such a grievous loss has said it takes four years to find a renewal of life. (Apparently four years is the half-life of grief.)

As one woman who has been there told me, “Our partners are gone. We can either live in this world without them, experiencing a full, active life . . . or we can half live a life while we are still connected to our dead great loves through the ether, which we can’t navigate or understand this side of death.

It isn’t a choice; you can’t “just get there.” But you will get there. And everything will suddenly feel new again. You will see possibilities as something toward which you want to leap, and you will suddenly feel untethered and able to make that leap.”

In ten months, by next April, I will have passed my fourth anniversary. April. A time of renewal. Maybe a time of my renewal.

In her book The Stillwater Meadow, Gladys Tabor wrote: “People have seasons . . . There is something steadfast about people who withstand the chilling winds of trouble, the storms that assail the heart, and have the endurance and character to wait quietly for an April time.”

And so, I will continue dealing with the upsurges and downswings of grief, with the tears and loneliness, with the uncertainty and confusion, and wait quietly for my April time.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Follow Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: an April time, Gladys Tabor, grief at three years, renewal after grief, The Stillwater Meadow