by Kathryn LaVon Davis

Created on: April 03, 2010

Tender, raw and open. She walked through the house, trying to attend to daily tasks. Cleaning, shopping, acknowledging and feeding the children; she had to make a conscious effort for everything to be normal, to do the bare minimum, because her instinct told her to stop and let it happen.

"Why?." she thought. "The greatest gift that we are given is love. We  use it, abuse it, do not tend it. We expect it to run effortlessly alongside life. It can't. The greatest gift we are given we must put ourselves fully into, to sustain it.  Like a gardener, we must grow it."

She would have done that too. And here she was, feeling this way again, but not in love. She'd sent James away and she wondered why she felt the way she did. She thought to the first time she'd sent him away, and how his presence, the way he loved her, brought out feelings about Michael.  Michael had run in the face of love. She determined then that she must be running, as well. She decided she had to be "the better man." Too quickly, she determined she was falling in love with James. She felt happy. She called him back to her. He loved her. He came to her.

Over the next week, however; she found herself having to talk herself into him. At the end of the week, she knew she wasn't falling in love, but that something else was happening. Love was rearing it's head from deep inside, where she'd buried it. It overshadowed all possibilities. Still.

She'd made great effort to grieve; to do everything but bury it. Now, nine years later, this emergence signified the depth of it; she'd not looked at that in a long time. For this Good Friday, though, she stopped and stood still and allowed every feeling to surface. She let herself lay in the tender, raw and open and allowed memories to drift back and tears to flow. She grieved a deep grief, a grief she thought she'd gotten through already. She hadn't intended to bury it, but did it somehow a centimeter at a time, almost unnoticed. To all appearances, she'd gotten through the heartache.

"Perhaps all healing is burying and exhuming," she thought. "Perhaps we deal with our demons with our stronger selves, when we're able to." She realized that she didn't really know if this meant that she'd never get past Michael or that she was beginning to. Her soft and gentle self was emerging and she now understood why people considered her to be tough. She'd forgotten this part of herself. Just as she'd lost Michael, she'd lost herself. For nine years.

Nine

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