A Visit, Perhaps

It's been nearly 6 months since my dear Suze passed away. I had 3 very busy months of memorial planning and respite trips away that I'd planned before she had passed. I was riding quite high on gratitude of knowing she wasn't suffering anymore and knowing how lucky we were to share the deep love we had. Still pretty high on that gratitude, but I was pretty tired after the trips and the caregiving exhaustion caught up to me. So I decided to stick around my house for June and July.

It has been something. Slowing down had me barely able to move from my chair in the living room…sometimes for days in a row. The physical and mental exhaustion took me over and I began to really swim in the grief and in my loss of my love, but also many of the plans and the purposes I had in life. I've been crying a lot more and have continued to struggled to remember Suze before the dementia. Her last year was so much suffering for her, and me, and those images were hanging with me. And then, I swear Suze visited me. My real first with that, though I do feel her energy and light around me a lot.

I decided to treat myself to monthly massages and they've been so good for me. My entire body is still all tightened up from the stress and loss of caregiving. I had been in the massage, kind of repeating "release" to myself the entire time because my shoulders and neck are so tight. As the massage was about to end, I had a cloth over my face and my eyes closed and then this circle appeared in my mind's eye. It opened and I heard in her voice, "Suze isn't in pain anymore." Then I burst out crying. The poor massage therapist. hahaha. But boy, talk about a release.

That one sentence from her hit me and told me to let go of those pictures of her pain. That was really only 4 intense years of a vibrant, bright, adventurous and loving life of my dear Suze. She helped thousands of people as a therapist and social worker. She loved big and laughed easily. That is who she was, not that last year, in particular, of dementia bullying her.

I looked at older pictures of her for the first time because of that visit from her, which I'm choosing to believe was her and not just my own little subconscious finally getting to work on that. Lol. In any case. Whatever that was. It was incredibly powerful. Of course, I've still barely left my living room chair since that happened on Thursday, but I will definitely take the change in my head and heart space about my own memories of the wonderful human I got to love and learn from for 21 years. She's still giving me gifts like this and now I know for sure that part of my purpose is to remember her as she was throughout her life, not how she was at the end of it.