Phantom Limb

My grief has awakened me to the profound loss of an integral, necessary part of my inner being. A life force that woke me up to the most deep, dark, parts of me. That fostered my light and pulled out from me the most concealed parts. At times it feels like I can still feel its presence. My “phantom limb” is playing tricks on me. A sweet subtle torture. The feeling that something that once was a part of me no longer is but my body refuses to accept. A forced separation from a part of me.

Grief has a way of awakening nerve endings that we don’t even know exist until something triggers them and all you feel is constant agony. Grief truly is the ultimate expression of love. We only grieve the things that we loved in ways that can only be explained by the pain we experience in the wake of the loss.

I have been feeling the presence of my “phantom limb” when I least expect it. It feels so real that it takes my breath away and knocks me completely off balance. The feeling that it’s still with me, accessing me in ways that only it knows how. It’s a reminder of how necessary it was to my very being and adjusting to its absence is virtually impossible but necessary to my survival.

When someone dies the permanence of their loss is severe. You have to accept that they will not be coming back. When someone you love leaves because they no longer can hold on to you, that pain seems worse, because you know that this part of you is somewhere out in the world and you have no access to them or whether they will ever return. For someone like me that can be the ultimate torture. It has proven to also be the ultimate motivation to explore myself more closely and more deeply. To identify the toxic parts of me, the parts that cultivate the most harmful aspects of me. The parts that I can chose to rid myself of because nothing in life is permeant except death.

Most of my life I have experienced severe abandonment issues. As a result, I have perpetuated a cycle of codependency relying on my partner for happiness and self-love. My attachment to my relationships is what kept me grounded, what provided me my happiness and so when there was turmoil in my relationship, I became a sinking ship, unable to function because I hadn’t learned that in order to have a healthy relationship that I needed to find love and security within me. That putting the responsibility on my partner to provide me happiness was not taking accountability for myself and taking advantage of them in the worst way because my unhappiness was then blamed on them. I became the victim and they the perpetrator. No accountability. And when that happens, manipulation happens. We manipulate the people we love most, and we manipulate ourselves to believe that we are helpless creatures, who need to be saved. No one can save us from ourselves. We can hope that they have the courage to walk alongside us but, in the end, the only person responsible for change and growth lies solely on us. This reveals the ultimate addiction and the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem.

With that being said accepting the impermanence of something we believe to be so profoundly necessary invokes tremendous fear. As humans we seek attachment and a sense of belonging because we believe that without those components we can’t survive. We feel so incomplete with ourselves that we fear being alone. We rely on the energy put forth by others to survive. We become emotional vampires, the blood addicts, that suck the life force from those around us to provide emotional nourishment. Nothing in this very mortal life is permanent. We lose things all the time. Career’s change, relationships end, people die. However, I am starting to think that for everything we lose, we gain something as well. We gain perspective, a memory, we grow, we change. We enter into addiction recovery.

I was raised catholic. I went to a catholic school my entire life. I even embarked on a Jesuit university for my undergraduate studies which is where ironically, I learned about Buddhism. I have never been one to explore many religions outside the one I was raised in but in college I had the opportunity to learn that if I were to choose a religion that I could get behind, that had a belief system that invoked change and encouraged mistakes I would chose Buddhism. Buddhists believe in the rebirth or reincarnation that occurs after death. That you can continue to come back until you reach nirvana. Buddhists profoundly accept our humanity and our fallibility. That at times we inflict harm on those that we love most. That with grace and forgiveness we have the opportunity to learn from our mistakes. This morning I am wondering, why do we need to die to be reborn. I think each loss we have is a rebirth in itself. We have to get used to the “new” life without the presence of our “phantom limb” that part of us that was so fundamentally important to us. Whether the loss came to us through death, the end of a relationship, a change in job, we have the choice to grow from it or get lost in the darkness of it. Either way we have a choice. We always have a choice. A choice to offer peace versus inflicting harm, to choose love over fear, to choose to love ourselves and others better.

If we can accept the loss of our “phantom limb” we allow ourselves permission to heal, to mourn the loss, and begin to adapt to its absence. The power to look within ourselves for the things we wish we could change, to break the generational foot hold that we have lived in, in the name of bettering ourselves or reaching nirvana. Either way it is a choice. It is an intentional decision to use the pain of the grief to live as authentically as we allow ourselves.