"I am not the person I was before... Writing, the thing which has always been my solace, my comfort, my therapy, has been halted... When my mind goes to the dark places, the imaginations, it's almost more than I can physically bare... I don't know why losing my father hasn't brought me some sort of enlightenment, to a deeper spiritual level..."
Each of these statements continues to be a struggle for me, and rereading them made me acutely aware of how little progression or growth or 'moving on' I've done on this grief journey. Sure, I'm no longer breaking down in tears in the middle of breakfast, but inside, deep in the inner most parts of who I am, I am still very much entangled in the snares of grief. It still sneaks up on me when I least expect it and reveals itself in surprising ways. It feels strange to almost be personifying the grief and giving it so much power, but it very much does feel like an entity all its own.
Nothing depicts the power of this grief better than the way I am now affected by music. This was another idea I'd identified back in that last post, "I know that I feel music in a way that I never did before..." yet it continues to shock me when it happens. Several times this past year, I've been stopped in my tracks as I've felt the power music grip me from deep within. Back in the spring at a music festival, while waiting in line for ice-cream, I had tears pouring down my cheeks. I didn't even realize it was happening until my daughter asked why I was crying; I had no real answer. The instrumental music, the crowd, the sounds, the scene, something about it all just overtook me.
Over the summer, Lindsay and I made plans to celebrate my fortieth birthday - even that felt odd: here I was planning to celebrate my 40th year of life, and half of the one who gave me life is no longer living.
Him before me.
There was no me before him.
We traveled to Colorado with the best of friends to see the Avett Brothers at Red Rocks- so many bucket list worthy items in just that one sentence! There, in that setting, the epitome of the beauty of God's creation all around, music acoustics in their most pure form, and the soul stirring lyrics of No Hard Feelings, my chest tightened and the tears fell without warning. 
And, then, just this past weekend, sitting in a movie theater to see something with a rating above PG for the first time in months, I was rocked to my core while watching A Star is Born. I could easily side-bar here and turn this into a movie review of one of the best movies I've seen since I can't remember when, but it was so much more than watching a movie for me.
From the themes of the story to the music throughout, my mind was swirling with thoughts of him, of the last two years. Specifically the Bradley Cooper song Maybe It's Time immediately resonated with me, and has echoed with me since.
When I struck the first key on the laptop this morning, I did not anticipate this post going in this direction. I couldn't have imagined there was anything else left to say about it all, not to mention the fact that I'm running out of Melissa lyrics for my titles, ha! I miss writing about nothing, about all the little nothings that add up to the something that is this life. I want to get back to writing about the kids and the day to day. I want to muse on about my unhealthy celebrity obsession and my even more unhealthy food choices. I even want to write about the other struggles and disappointments and challenges that life thrown at us in the past two years because, Lord knows, the world has certainly not stopped turning on my behalf.
I heard it said recently, that when you grow up with a deep spiritual foundation and something comes along and rocks that, you can feel as if you are free-falling, as if the bottom has been ripped from beneath you. Boy, can I relate.