It’s often said that Time heals all wounds. I think I believed that as a teenager, when someone broke my heart, and in fact, time has healed those wounds…I can barely even recall what they were, these many years later.
But I’m not convinced that Time is always healing. For many of us, some days it seems as if the news of losing Michael is as fresh as the day it happened almost two years ago. We struggle to imagine what that pain must feel like for his parents, his sisters and brothers, his children, and his extended family…surely it is ours magnified many thousands of times over.
I know that we can’t go on just focusing on our loss. But when the loss has left such a huge hole in our lives, we have to think about filling that hole with something, however unsatisfactory that “something” might be. I am reminded of a pothole in the middle of the road. It has destroyed the integrity of the road…the road can never be complete again, no matter how many times it is paved over. Traffic is disrupted by having to drive around it, but its presence remains. And then the hole gets filled. While the filled hole allows traffic to move with a bit less interruption, the reminders of the hole are still visible.
That hole in all of our hearts is a huge, gaping one to be sure. And we are constantly trying to fill it: listening to music, watching videos, reading…anything to put us back in touch with Michael. But the hole remains.
A couple of weeks ago, when one of our group also suddenly lost a brother, I wrote about acute grief as expressed in the song, Stranger in Moscow. I said: “I searched in vain for the joy, that one little sparkle that is often there [in Michael’s work].” I think when we are looking to fill such a gaping hole in our hearts, we will take any morsel we can get. The morsel in that particular song, for me, came at the end, when I realized the “sparkle” in the song, was, of course, the beautiful voice of the singer.
If we could send support to Michael’s family, we would be sending mere crumbs, we know. Like throwing gravel in a pothole. We know that we couldn’t offer much in the way of actual support…we are, after all, scattered across the planet. What could we say that would be supportive? That we love him still? That we hope to honor all the good he stood for? That we are really trying to “make that change” both in ourselves and in the world? That we believed in him then, and we still believe in him and his values? That for us, he lives still, in our ears and in our hearts? That we appreciate all that he was and is still? That we are grateful for their having shared him with us?
I don’t have any answers. But I know we compose these meditations with love, the L.O.V.E that Michael spoke of and sang of so often. And that we are sending his family that L.O.V.E., and that they are not alone.
by Diana Foley
Copyright (c) 2011
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