It’s March, it’s March. The sweltering month of March, and everyone seems en route to escape.
Escape. Ah, escape!
That’s how I spent the first year of my being widowed. Running away. Escaping reality to face reality.
It doesn’t heal the hurts, may even rub salt on festering wounds. The sight of places you’ve visited together could bring an overwhelming sense of loss and flood of memories, while the places you’ve never seen together, a tinge of regret… “He would have enjoyed this.”
There’s something overwhelming about grief that makes one want to break out, break loose, start afresh and lose oneself in distant places, new spaces bereft of personal history and the encumberance of remembrance.
A friend writes, “Our family experienced this after the death of our son. I couldn’t stand New York and to see the places he loved. My husband and I gifted his wife with a trip to Europe, while we took a cross-country trip from the East Coast to the West Coast with some of our other kids. We drove through places we haven’t seen, like the Rocky Mountains and North Dakota, where I wept at the memorial for the Indians at Wounded Knee. (Remember the movie, ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee?’) Then we made another cross-country trip from London to Edinburgh in Scotland, passing through places like the moors of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ Stonehenge, Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, and an ancient cemetery in Glastonbury where I wept again.
“Only then,” my friend concludes, “can one come back to the routine of ordinary life. It took two years before I could say to myself again, ‘My days begin with a morning.’”
Unbearable onslaught
There is, it seems, a need to purge oneself of the unbearable onslaught of grief.
Not that travel is the only way to assuage grief. Memories are, after all, part of the baggage we carry on board and abroad. But it helps to distract, if only momentarily, from the most acute onslaught of pain. Eventually, God and time take over to accomplish the healing work, and we bow our heads in silent gratitude, even as we struggle to pick up the pieces of shattered lives and broken dreams.
When we lost our first baby to measles, pre-vaccination days, my late husband and I took refuge among friends in Baguio, and upon our return to Manila, made sure to stay away from the empty and silent nest we called home until we were exhausted and ready to retire for the night.
Subsequently, when the offer to work with a start-up regional publication in Hong Kong came up, we grabbed it; it offered a way out of our bereavement.
Return to the routine
Beyond the escape route of travel, we return to the routine, the humdrum, the mundane, to traverse once again the familiar landscapes of our life, and hopefully pick up where we left off, sufficiently refreshed, renewed, and reinvigorated to finally renegotiate the twists and turns of the road, the ups and downs of the journey, and eventually to cease to wonder if somewhere along the way, we had taken the wrong path, or turned the wrong corner.
And in the lingering afterglow of the deepening twilight, we learn to accept, come to terms with, and anticipate the coming of night. —CONTRIBUTED