Today I’m feeling a bit heavy with loss, thinking of my family in particular as we continue the process of cleaning and clearing my Aunt’s home.  It was unexpected and terrifying and surreal—I don’t think any of us knew how bad she really was.  She felt so much guilt over what she had done that she didn’t feel she could ask for help—and she was so lonely without her family she didn’t want to.  I feel like I had no idea who she was at the end—I really hadn’t known who she was for the last several years.  Going through her things in that house, the house that used to be so beautiful and cool and full of life, now dead, and void, and while full of things, is so devoid of life.  it hasn’t had life in there for a long time if we’re really honest.  It’s a sad thing to watch the energy, the heart disappear from something that meant so much.  It’s hard to accept that, while the person was still here, we were still losing them.  We’d already lost them a long time ago.  It’s the toss between wanting to go back and relive it and wanting to stop everything that happened.  The one moment.  We can pinpoint that one moment when it all went downhill.  And seeing all of what was, all of the hope and potential just squandered on desire, ego, and addiction.  It’s a cautionary tale instead of a life lived.  Trying to make ends meet all the way until the end when there was every opportunity to create genuine abundance and flow.

And now I have a few of the things that remind me of the times we had together, the person/people they all were then.  And looking back I know that I had no real idea of what was happening, I was just as involved in the intoxication of the lifestyle, the cockiness of the endless flux of things and abundance.  I literally didn’t know any better—and it was a drug.  It felt so good to have that kind of false power, the feeling everything was in endless supply.  We were all on a high.  I was reliant on the work of what others had already done, and I see now, I never learned how to make and sustain anything for myself.  We never even learned how to keep up with what others had done for us.  We got lazy and complacent, and some got greedy.  And we all let it go in the end because we couldn’t maintain or sustain anything of what we had.  We could have stepped in and replenished it and made choices to build it back up, but none of us knew how.  I had hoped they (the family) would come to their senses and restore it, put aside the pride and work toward fixing what had been broken.  Toward doing what was right and making it better.  But they dug their heels in, dug deeper, thinking they could prove their way out of it, that they could get out of it on their own and didn’t need anyone.  And then there was nothing left.  Literally nothing left. 

For something that had such a golden age so to speak, it is heartbreaking when it fails.  I’m not trying to be dramatic and I’m not ignorant to that pattern throughout history—everything ebbs and flows and power fails all the time.  What fills must empty.  But there is a strange emptiness to be the one to clear the sources.  It is a strange thing to resurrect the little bit of life left in all the death, and I’m literally in the middle of that–I have the last living thing from that house—her cat is now with me.  I can’t remember if I talked about this.  It’s a weird dichotomy having this living thing that I never knew until now be in my home, afraid and alone.  I lost my cat, he lost his owner, and now we are trying to find ourselves again.  He’s a sweet boy and I love cats so that isn’t the issue, but I feel there is still a painful lesson that needs healing here.  It’s like living on foreign territory.  Neither one of us knows how to act with the other but we know we need to rely on each other at this time.  We are both hurting and we aren’t trying to replace what we lost, but we find ourselves in this situation together and we have no choice but to figure out which way to go next.  This is the next step in filling up again.  It’s finding the life and tending it until it can flourish once more.  Sometimes it feels a little bleak, but we go back to find the hope.  Take the small wins, remember the good, honor the whole, and keep moving.  Life keeps moving.