If I had known...

On Friday I received the lyrics to a song that touched me.  They were sent by someone who has been on my heart frequently over the past several months.  As I read the words one line haunted me:  Your mind tricked you to feel the pain of someone close to you leaving the game of life.  The tears streamed down my face as I read that line over and over.  I spent much of this past weekend crying, hoping to get it all out of my system, but the tears seem to be endless.  I only shared the following poem with the person who sent me the lyrics and was not going to blog it, until I felt God break the shell around my heart wide open this morning.  Emotions are sitting heavy on my heart as I type.  The tears continue to stream down my face, a mixture of guilt, sadness, fear and relief but most importantly, tears of love.  True love. Yes, it makes me cry, not because it hurts rather because the feeling is so overwhelming and powerful that it cannot be stopped.  Until very recently, I contended that true love would only find me once and once it was gone, that was it … that God had only written my name across one heart.  I was wrong, at least, I have the hope that I was wrong.

If I had known…

If I had known that the last time I held you was to be the last time I could hold you … I would have held you longer

If I had known that the last time I heard you laugh was to be the last time … I would have told you another story that would make you laugh again

If I had known that the last time we traveled together was to the be the last time … I would have planned a longer route

If I had known that the last time I saw you was to be the last time I would see you … I would have loved you with reckless abandon.

If I had known that I didn't know … ... well, there was no way for either of us to know the paths we would choose to follow.

I never stopped loving you - you took a piece of my heart with you.  I have already apologized to my ex-husband for this, but I've never told you … I thought I my heart was whole when I married him … up until the day you died.  On that day my heart shattered.  As I was picking up the pieces to bind it back together I realized that a piece of it was missing.  The piece that you took with you.

I still love you, I always will … you were my friend first, so I know you will understand … today I'm taking that missing piece back from you.  I know you are still with me, I see you in my dreams.  You will always be in my heart.  With my heart whole again my capacity to fully love another is limitless and powerful.

I met Elton in 1996 and felt an instant connection to him, like I had known him my whole life.  I was only 29 at the time and was still healing from the grief of the demise of my first marriage.  He and I would sit at the bar and talk about anything and everything, for hours.  He became my best friend and I moved into the basement of his mom's house so I could start saving for a home of my own.  Our relationship changed over time and we started dating.  I loved everything about him.  He encouraged me to write, to tap into those things that bring me joy.  His love and encouragement helped me rebuild my lost confidence.  We were both beautifully imperfect people and none of it mattered … we were equal, neither was superior nor inferior to the other.  He brought out bits and pieces of my personality that I thought had been long since destroyed by almost a decade of bad decisions.  He helped me re-imagine myself.  By 2000 I had saved enough money to put a down-payment on my house and he moved in with me.  I wanted to get married, he didn't … and, up until this past Friday night, I had maintained that this was why I ended the relationship.  It wasn't.

Elton was a functioning alcoholic and I was beginning to develop, at the very least, a bad habit, so I stopped going to the bar in 1999.  When I quit drinking every night I started seeing his patterns more clearly.  My love for him was unconditional, it wasn't blind.  When Elton was sober, he was loving, supportive and followed through on commitments made while sober.  When he was drunk, he was still loving and supportive but could not remember any commitments he made while drunk.  Since he had usually been drinking by the time I saw him at night I was frequently left disappointed and feeling let down because he would forget that we had made plans.  It was frustrating, but I found ways to cope.  He hardly ever talked about his time in the military, however he would talk about dark looming thoughts that plagued him.  I didn't know anything about PTSD then however I did know that the past is indestructible … and the demons of our past are usually too strong for us to deal with alone.  Elton was self-medicating and every night I would sit in bed wondering when, or IF, he would come home.  Addiction is a destructive force and if the addict doesn't see it as a problem there is nothing anyone else can do.  He didn't see that he had a problem but it was destroying me.  In 2001 I finally broke up with him yet he continued to live in my home and we were still incredibly good friends … he was still my best friend.

Shortly after that I met my second ex-husband.  I had not really processed the grief of the end of my relationship with Elton, maybe because I was the one that left him and didn't think I had anything to process?  In 2014 I apologized to my ex-husband for what started to reveal itself to me after our marriage ended (too little, too late).  In December of 2012 Elton committed suicide and on that day my heart shattered.  I felt so much guilt - not because I thought I could have done something to prevent Elton's decision, but because on that day I realized that I had been secretly wishing for him to come back into my life.  When I gave him my heart I never took all of it back … I felt so guilty about this secret that I refused to fully grieve or admit to anyone, let alone the man I had married, that I carried this secret for so long.  During the two years that followed, I couldn't find any reasons to be happy, I blamed the stress of my job.  I blamed being a married yet single parent (I worked days & he worked 2^nd shift - making it hard to find ANY couple time EVER and forcing both of us into a single parent role) … these things were true, however, between Friday and this morning I finally understood that the guilt of my secret yearning was the root cause of my feeling so unhappy during those last two years of my marriage … and so afraid to embrace the possibility of finding true love again.  Admitting that Elton was, up until recently, the only man I have ever truly loved is like a kick in my gut … or like a knot that refuses to untangle.

I began seeing Elton in my dreams in 2014, when I was struggling through the end of my second marriage.  The first time it happened it frightened me … was I going crazy?  I'm trying to let you go, why are you haunting my dreams?  After it happened a couple more times I began to understand that it was time for me to begin forgiving myself for the past.  I honestly thought I had until this weekend.  I am so grateful to have received the lyrics to that song on Friday.  I began seeing Elton in my dreams again, this time was different though.  Everything about me has changed.  I have NO idea what the future holds for me … I just know that the love that has filled my heart is deeper and unlike anything I have ever experienced before.  I want to be afraid of it yet I am not … it is time for me to trust that God has plans for me that are beyond anything I can fathom.  This chapter of my life has yet to unfold … I anticipate there will be many more tears shed before it is over and I welcome the adventure.