September 9, 2021 - One decade... be present.

It’s been a decade since I got sick. I didn’t know then, that night, that my life was dramatically changed. I’ve done therapies, and they’ve...

January 13th, 2019 one more year, still grieving, but still trying


Here's a picture of my beloved flute... truly, this beautiful instrument feels like a part of my body when I hold it, an extension of my arms, hands -




I wrote a piece a year ago "Speaking my truth, the depth of my loss," & it still resonates... I said at the end  "I KNOW I need to create some kind of life... but I ALSO need to feel - even on meds, and CBT -  the depth of my loss...".

These 2 ideas - creating some kind of life, & feeling the depth of my loss - will always be true... they're not mutually exclusive.

Sometimes the pain of my loss - how my life changed -is a deep, heavy ache inside of me... the loss I feel the most keenly is still about music... giving flute lessons, playing duets, trios, playing in a band... simply picking up my flute, taking out a favorite piece of music - & playing.

I also used to sing in our congregational choir - which I really enjoyed - but that's been taken away from me as well, by my illness. I can sing with Ron & my daughters for Chanukah, or sing Happy Birthday, but that's it. Better than nothing, absolutely, but a major loss.

I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that this pain will never completely go away. It's the same as the loss of a loved one... hopefully over time, the pain, the grief will be less intense.

Part of that will come from talking about it.  I learned to play flute when I was 9 yrs old, took my first flute lesson in high school. I first sang in a choir as a college student - & I'm now 57. Nowhere in my plans was it "get sick at age 50, a life-changing kind of sick."

But that's what happened. I'm one of many, many people with health conditions that change their lives forever.  Forever isn't a word to be used lightly - just like the word "never" - but sometimes it applies.

And yet, if I'm honest, I'm still grateful to be alive, to be able to try... even though some days I don't really feel like trying, I feel like saying "the hell with it"... but on most days, I know I need to keep going, figuring out whatever I can.


Bookmark the permalink. RSS feed for this post.

Leave a Reply

© 2014 - 2019 Tamar Schwartz, Visible Person Invisible Problem (VPIP). Powered by Blogger.

Search

Swedish Greys - a WordPress theme from Nordic Themepark. Converted by LiteThemes.com.