Here are two more journal entries with their accompanying poems "THE EDGE" and "MEMORIES"

December 24, 2001

            Christmas Eve - all by myself!  Even though I spent six hours at the House of Friendship serving Christmas dinner to homeless men, cleaning up and looking after others, it did not do anything to alleviate the pain and sadness and did not fill, not even touch, the huge hole that is now my heart.

            This is the first time in many years that I did not put up a Christmas tree and decorate it.  No candles are flickering on the tree - I hope you are relieved now since you were always concerned about the danger burning fifty real candles on a 9-foot tree in an old home with all the wooden doors and trims were presenting, in your mind.  I remember the first Christmas in our home where you were sitting in front of the Christmas tree when I lit the candles - pointing the fire extinguisher towards the tree, shaking your head about my insistence, declaring me crazy, muttering under your breath.

            You did relax about it over the years although you also, though unsuccessfully, did your best to talk me out of it each year, afraid I would burn down the house some day.  Well, no worries for you this year - nothing's going on here, no tree, no candles!  I can't stand the Christmas cheer.  Nothing to celebrate; nobody to celebrate with.  Yes, I know I have friends who say they care and probably do care.  I know I don't seem to appreciate them for their efforts.  Their main fault is that they are not you!

            I keep hoping and wishing that any moment now I'd wake up from this terrifying nightmare.  God, why is this so hard?  Who are you?  Are you at all?  Nothing but emptiness inside and outside.  How can emptiness fill my entire life?  I know I keep asking the same questions; all my mind can do these days is regurgitate the same questions ad nauseam.  My body certainly cannot keep up with that.  I'm steadily losing weight.  Presumably, the ever-expanding emptiness is devouring my physical body as well - not much left by now.  None of my clothes fit any more - none of the beautiful clothes you bought for me, Paul.  Your taste was so impeccable.  You had the knack of picking out unusual and exquisite clothes for yourself and me.  And it took you no time whatsoever!

            God, the loss of Paul has deprived me of so much, most of all of love and support.  To make matters worse, his loss has also caused my loss of you.  Paul's death is pushing me over the edge, into an abyss that's too dark, too ominous for me to enter.  For more than four months I've been stumbling and fumbling.  I'm fighting the darkness, the emptiness.  But the courage to be, to be me, to find me has dissolved, evaporated.  I no longer feel brave, safe, supported, or loved.  Like a castaway, I can feel the darkness drowning me, choking me.  I cannot resist its grip much longer.  God, Paul, Spirit, where are you???

March 10, 2002

"Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left?  You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.  I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation.  I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one."[1]

            These sentences jumped out at me today when I was leafing through C.S. Lewis' booklet, still unable to stay focussed on reading.  How much truth this statement holds for me!  I have no idea when after his wife's death he wrote this, but it doesn't matter.  And it also doesn't seem to matter that his wife died after a lengthy struggle with cancer, whereas Paul died unexpectedly, suddenly.  I'm beginning to realize that grief and all it entails forces us to face those inner shadows and demons that connect us at a deep and universal level.  Well, now that I'm more aware of that, I feel absolutely no wiser.  I hurt just as much, so what good does all this writing do me?

             And yet, I can't stop.  In some weird and crazy way, reading Lewis' observations, at least certain ones, make me feel not quite so alone-perhaps someone else understands how I feel after all?

            Sadly, I haven't met those that truly understand.  Yes, I know there are some that are closer; there are those who make an honest effort.  But how many times will I hear the suggestion that I need to remember the good times we had together, to enjoy the good memories?  I'm no longer sure what memories really are.  I look at pictures only to realize that they've become meaningless.  They are not bringing Paul back or our life together.  Nothing's evoking Paul's face or his voice for me, regardless how often I stare at his pictures.

            So what are memories?  Glimpses of a past that changes each time we look at it.  The instant we call on a particular moment, it transforms itself into a different moment, constantly eluding capture.  Does that make sense?  In my confused mind it's crystal clear.

            Perhaps I'm afraid of capturing the past despite my constant attempts to cling to it.  Am I frightened, as Lewis suggests, that if I hang on to the good memories, "my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode-like a holiday-that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged.  And then it would come to seem unreal-something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else."[2]  It's true.  I feel Paul slipping away from me with every passing moment.  My memory is fading, making me feel our old life is becoming less real.  More and more frequently doubts are surfacing about what is real and what was real as if I were making up all the memories.

            Memory keeps shifting shape, colour and texture.  It's not frozen in time, although time definitely seems to be frozen.  Each minute has its moments, however dull, bleak or irrelevant they might be.  In a rather surreal sense, time completely escapes me these days.  Time is just as temporary as memories, admittedly, for entirely different reasons.  If memories could make the past the present, real and alive, wouldn't we then be truly enjoying the memories so we could miss the present?  That's what I'm looking for, of course.  Still, the fact remains that such a merger is just as unreal as undoing the past altogether.

            Memories, even just the thought of memories, arouse deep frustration in me and fuel anger and disappointment.  The harder I try to remember any aspect of the past, the further it moves away from me.  Paul, I am failing you with every serious attempt to bring you back!

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¹C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1961), 52.

²C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1961), 52-53.