13- The Rest Of You

13- The Rest Of You

In the last year of my late husband’s life, long before we even knew he was ill, I would catch myself at times, gazing at him in simple appreciation..  I would feel the gratitude well up in me for having him in my life.  At night before falling asleep, I would think about all he had given me and dwell in appreciation for him.  Fourteen years my senior, he had been the wise shaman who had opened me up to myself in ways I could never have imagined. Our shared perspectives and limitless curiosity made for a partnership of uncommon explorations.  Deep philosophical conversations and shared mystical experiences framed our lives together.  This kind of reflection was not typical behavior for me and it is only highlighted in my memory because it happened so often in the year before he passed away.  It was like some part of me was drinking in those last months with him before either of us even knew these were our last months together.  Intuition is indeed a curious alai. In retrospect I am so grateful for those times.  For the stillness and clarity of those moments.  For the awareness that I wasn’t taking our life for granted but truly connecting with him.  What I couldn’t have know was how the loss of Phil would connect me to an aspect of myself I had even realized was missing.

In that last year I had also decided I wanted more laughter and light-heartedness in my life and I used to tell Phil that we needed to be less serious and more playful.  As philosophical minded clinicians, we hadn’t come from particularly light-hearted stock.  I was far worse than Phil about the serious side of things, but something in me knew it was time for change.  I used to say that in my next life I want laughter and love making to be the priority, and seriousness could fall by the way-side. I’m a big believer in calling into your life those things you want to step into and as we neared Phil’s retirement I could imagine us opening up to a whole new way of life.  With plans to hit the road in an RV and go where the wind blew us, it was easy to imagine a lighter more care free way of living.  I had long ago unplugged from the world of clocks, calendars and schedules.  I truly lived a quiet life filled with creativity, introspection and spiritual pursuits of awakening.  It’s amazing how my life today reflects so much of what I envisioned for myself and yet so little of the structure I envisioned living it through.  

Not quite a year after Phil’s passing I had an experience that would shift everything.  The uncertainty of how my future would unfold as a widow in my mid-fifties was not really foremost in my thoughts.  I was getting on with life by starting up a small decorative arts business, as much for my sanity as for the income it would provide.  With Phil gone I had so much time on my hands I felt as if I might fall into an abyss of emptiness if I didn’t throw myself into something. I wasn’t lonely but I was without a foundation for my future.  I had always been independent minded and going life alone didn’t scare me in the least.  I trusted things would unfold if I just put one foot in front of the other toward a direction I enjoyed.  Then one morning everything shifted in a way I could have never foreseen.

As I was almost finished drying my hair in front of the mirror one morning, I felt a type of energetic weight drop into me.  Startled, I turned off the dryer and stood staring into the mirror as an understanding of what had happened began to fill my awareness.  I don’t know how else to describe either sensation.  A slight heaviness simply fell from the upper right hand side above me and merged with my being as, in my mind, I heard the words “the rest of you”.  In a flash of all consuming awareness my consciousness then expanded, revealing an understanding of what was happening.  Apparently an energetic aspect of myself had shifted to assist me throughout the previous year.  The loss of both my father and my husband only a day apart, while being the primary caretaker for my girlfriend as she fought the same cancer that had taken Phil in a matter of weeks, had been no small gauntlet.  However, I was completely awestruck at what I was being shown.  

Unaware that this energetic assist had even happened, I was apparently ready to reintegrate some aspect of myself that had been operating apart from me.  However, my higher wisdom was also communicating that the energy aspect that was coming in now, wasn’t the same energetic aspect that had moved aside the year before.  I was then shown that for years I had been living as if I was my late husband’s age, and now it was time to embrace my true age.  Phil had passed away only two months prior to his seventieth birthday.   I suddenly realized that I had no idea of what it was truly like to be in my mid-fifties.  Stunned by the experience, I sat dumbfounded for quite some time.  Later that day, still somewhat dazed, it began to sink in that not only was I truly clueless about what life was like in one’s mid-fifties, I was going to have to figure it out on my own.

All week I kept reliving the experience in my mind.  Having had such a solitary lifestyle with Phil, I had virtually no social life outside of my family, and with my closest friend battling much bigger issues, I really had no one to talk with about the experience or where it had left me.  I wrote letters in my journal to Phil but I knew I needed to connect with others my age in order to explore this second half of life issue.  But where to start was a dilemma.  Then one day while tidying up the living room, a commercial came on TV for a free online match-making service.  I grasped at it like it was an inspiration idea.  Not the dating part,  but I thought it would be a great way to peer into the world of fifty-somethings without having to go ‘out there’.  To say I’m an introvert, as anyone who knows me can testify, is a huge understatement!  Anonymously peering into profiles of my age group across the vast landscape of cyberspace seemed a perfect place to start.  I  went to my computer, signed on and began my voyeuristic adventure.  Was I in for a surprise!  

I had never even been in a chat room let alone on a dating site.  I was naive to say the least.  Thinking at the most, I might connect with a few women friends or someone in my position, I began to fill out the profile.  That’s when the profile questions clued me in to a world I couldn’t begin to understand.  Fortunately my daughter was much more savvy and helped me realize I wasn’t going to find any newly widowed “girlfriends”….unless I was looking for something she was quite sure I wasn’t looking for.  Like I said, naive!  We laughed about the whole thing but decided it couldn’t hurt to use the site to see what fifty-something looked like.  I answered hundreds of questions, filled out a very blunt and honest profile, included recent pictures, and reviewed the matches sent to me by the algorithm of the site.  I have to say I was amazed that an obviously overweight, mid-fifty year old woman who told the truth about her mystical and less than mainstream weirdness, would even get any responses.  But I did, and after only a week I knew cyber connecting wasn’t for me.  I decided to delete my profile when I noticed a very short, very polite e-mail from someone my age who lived about an hour away.  Before deleting I chose to look at our respective answers to the questions posed by the site.  Out of hundreds of multiple-choice questions we had answered almost every one the same way.  So, I replied to his message.  From that day on long e-mails and lively banter through texting ensued and we found ourselves writing non-stop for a week.  His sincerity, sense of humor and honesty amazed me.  The things we had in common were uncanny.  An artist like myself, and as deeply in love with music as I had always been, was just the beginning of our connection.  He found my ‘weirdness’ intriguing and I found his sense of humor just the breath of fresh air I had wanted for so long.  A week later we met and have been together ever since.  The last few years have flown by with love, laughter and understanding I couldn’t have imagined.  Apparently I didn’t have to wait until my next incarnation to experience a life where laughter and lovemaking were the priority….and there is still room for my metaphysical weirdness.  Meeting Michael was definitely arranged, but not by an online dating site!  That was just the conduit.  We are as amazed as anyone as we venture into the second half of life together, but we know it was not without planning and design from the soul level.

The story doesn’t end there.  It has other twists and turns that makes it all the sweeter.  Just as Phil and I were destined to meet and grow together, following my surrender experience at the cemetery on the farm, so were Michael and I.  Only this time it had been his surrender experience that unknowingly triggered my journey into his life.  In the three years prior to meeting me, his life had been turned upside down.  A successful thirty year career in a rapidly diminishing industry coincided with the foreclosure fiasco that swept across the country leaving him to start over in every area of his life.  He had lost his career, his home and his marriage.  A job offer in Texas had moved him into my neck of the woods, but not without taking a devastating three year toll on him.  Alone and lonely, all he had worked his entire life to build was suddenly gone with seemingly no rebound.  No matter how hard he tried, Michael faced his own dark night of the soul.  He was just emerging from it when a last ditch effort to rebuild and share his life with someone, coincided with my one week venture into an online community I was prompted by guidance and synchronicity to explore.  What were the odds?  Pretty good when you consider that what really met was Michael’s willingness to surrender and my willingness to follow the intuitive breadcrumbs strewn before me.  We just happened to be the faces on the energetic pull that our choices created.

I am quite certain the meeting between Michael and I was part of a grand design.  And I know that Phil had a huge hand in it!  This has been confirmed in my communication with him and I have been told by two intuitives who I very much trust, that he proudly takes credit for arranging our meeting.  It just happened so easily and effortlessly and in such a tiny window of opportunity!  On my end, following a year of illness and loss, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.  On Michael’s end it was the result of deciding to give life all he had rather than give in to all he’d lost.  Together we are both more than we were alone and we marvel everyday at a life we never expected to know.  I am in many ways for Michael what Phil was for me; opening new ways of thinking and experiencing the world.  He is for me the laughter, love and adventure I was calling into my future, as well as a support system in every way for the reinvention of my life.  Just as Phil supported me in opening up my world, Michael supports me in taking all that I found into the world!  Each man honors the other as they live side by side in my heart, each bringing gifts that I cherish and could have never found on my own.