Having recently had an experience with one of my children, I found myself having to process their first heartache of love. Such innocence had escaped and here we were, me wishing I could fix it and knowing I couldn’t. I realized why this hit me so hard. Everyone knows heartache eventually, a broken heart of lost dreams and the process it takes to move through grieving, but this was different. After some meditation and a few days of mulling this over and waiting patiently for the revelation, I realized that the heartache room does not exist nor is it decorated until one’s heart is actually broken.
I wanted to spare my child of this insidious pain, but each of us has to take our own journey, we can’t take the journey for anyone else (this took a minute in my life to figure out-don’t think I have it all together for sure). Knowing that pain so well, I can touch it still! This had me wondering if this could be some sort of stronghold over our family, it was so familiar! But this event brought a sort of closeness between us that we had never tread. I was needed for experience from traveling, negotiating, surviving, and healing from the pain! I also felt in those moments that we would always need each other, that the bond between a parent and their child is a soothing agent for heartache, and for the most part, and in some families, a safe place to greive and turn for wisdom and support.
This whole thing is like stirring the coverings of an underground bunker, clearing away debris to get to the door in order to open it up. The bunker is a visual for me of a deep secure place that others would not know about unless one decides to share it, otherwise, the room of the first heartache is a place only we know, and truly, only we can enter!
When one does not have a bunker or a room yet, opening the door can be daunting. It is a place one has never been, and it smarts! The pain seems unbearable at times and it is difficult, or imposible, for some to even eat, sleep, and possibly leave the room or the couch (subsequent trips may involve ice cream, but not the first visit). But once there, it seems safe to invite someone in, there actually may be a need to share with someone, anyone, now that the someone whom was your heart is gone. Only when here, reaching out to another or some strange article on the web, does one start to have hope. Hope that this will not continue forever. Hope for a future, knowing one has not been here yet, but another has gotten out of the bunker. This flicker of hope, a wanting of the heart to one day stop bleeding. Discussing similarities and body reactions to such grief, possibly unable to sustain oneself because of the inability to swallow, puts the whole body into the equation.
Then there is the searching! Searching for THE reason WHY, one’s mind flashing answer after answer, citing specific instances again and again. Trying to piece together why the betrayal happended, what one did to cause this betrayal, thinking with hope that somehow reconciliation will occur by some miracle saving oneself from this death of something created together. The hope of forever was a campanion through the struggles of the relationship only to find it had abandoned you!
We are meant to survive past our stories! These experiences leave little and sometimes large holes that can let the sunshine in. It becomes perspective but this wisdom has been earned and will be earned in days and weeks following the creation of our bunker. It can not be transfered, it is a debt of love that must be paid by every recipient.
The hardest part is the dreams, more specifically the lost dreams. The deep seated hopes and dreams, the goals for the future, either discussed or quietly contemplated and seated singularly in our bunker, must unravel and decorate the room of heartache. These are the deepest cuts where mere mention of such things can bring streams down one’s face wondering how water can leak like that without self-control!
The slow withering of red passionate love can only be seen when it has been extinguished or near completion. After many, or in some cases a few heartbreak(s), one has a library of which to draw from. A particular case can be removed from the shelf and opened up for reading, sliding and skimming one’s fingers softly across the pages, feeling the anguish by mere gaze of the pages, deciding to dive in and read means more tears no matter the years. But one has something to draw from when it occurs again. The more volumes, the more hope to draw from one’s own room, rather than the desperate lashing about with the first heartbreak, not knowing that this too shall pass and that there will be other lovelies and more joy, love, happiness, and memories. Heck, there might even be the one! This is the hope of experience. This new dream can bring much expectation, like a plentiful well, bucket after bucket, retrieving water until satisfied!
Knowing things will get better and one will be delivered out of a ruiness calamitous condition of sorrows, is just the thing to get one off of the couch and back to the moment of living-even with just an inkiling of hope.
And yet the REAL FIRST heartbreak has no stories. It does not have a library to draw from for hope. Instead, this is the first publication, the main room, one that will stay with us for a lifetime-deep deep down inside our core in some mysterious room (hence the bunker) reserved only for this legend. And everyone eventually fills such a space. It is the most significant of rooms in our mansion of memories. It has the darkest “what if’s” that are dismissed by subsequent volumes only until old age when one may ponder a search for lost dreams in this room that few will awaken.
It is a comforatable room to walk through when one finds themself traveling down this lonely and painful boulevard again, and perhaps again! I wonder if this is the room some sit in at the end, the disconnection from this world to the next. A room of regret, but yet the strong pillar that aids the endurance of present pain.
My library gives me solstice in the storm of life and can not be checked out of my library by another, even my own children! Although the stories and volumes may help, the first heartbreak is the first volume! So it is, the volume is written in spite of the nagging denial! It must be written and the first room must be furnished. Then one must walk out and close the door (for now), put the volume on the shelf for another day. Move on! They say to oneself, no matter the age, “this is all part of growing up,” until it is your turn!
I have my share of volumes and each one teaches me something new. Very good.
I love the library example – each experience is a book we can “take off the shelf” – I love this, and it does apply to everything. My experiences, volume by volume, are part of my uniqueness. I am old and finally realize that my uniqueness belongs to me, and I do not need to try to “fit it in” for others’ approval. I just need to BE.