Fall is here. The trees are beginning to quietly drop leaves in my pond and on my walkway.  It makes me smile to recall piles of dusty leaves that I have jumped in and scattered until the raker called a halt to my leaping disruption of his work.  I loved piles of leaves.  Running, jumping, hot and sweating caused me to fall down in the bed after bath and pass out.  Physical action was a most effective sleeping pill, both in helping me sleep and in elevating my sense of well-being.

 

Once following a terrible loss, I dug a garden out by hand and spade.  As I ripped through the grass and turned shovels of dirt over small treasures came to light.  The place I was digging had been a dumping ground for a long gone drug store and the small patent medicine bottles that the soil released most likely were made around the turn of the century.  Many of the bottles had contained the gift of the poppy  - laudanum. 

 

The first time I had seen laudanum and "tincture of opium" medicine bottles was when I lived in a small coastal town and was in the rear room of an old general merchandise store.  All along the windows in the very back of the storeroom lined up on shelves, were these pretty, little bottles; some with the liquid still in them.  It was common practice in those long ago days for physical and emotional pain to be treated with opiates and alcohol.  Many upstanding families had addicts who had gotten "hooked" on the contents of these pretty little bottles. Women were particularly prone to this type of addiction since they were "fragile" of mind and body and needed to be eased through the pain of life;protected from hard times lest they crack under the strain and go mad. 

 

Life hands out hard times. Mine took me to my knees wailing like a child lost forever in a dark wood.  There was no comfort or making sense of the pain as in labor pains with the reward of a baby.  I would have raged at the time at anyone who dared suggest that there was a reason for such loss;such agony.  There seemed no way of surviving the twisting, non-stop,to the marrow of the bone dropping into a bottomless abyss.

 

Each goes through grief in a deeply personal way.  There is no right way to swim the torrent.  I bought a puppy, dug in the earth until exhausted, sat in a chair and stared at nothing.  The grief followed me into my sleep when I did sleep and dogged my every step.  I hated people who were going about their day as if this hollow world still made sense.  It made no sense to me and there were periods when I could have cared less about any part of the world or the people on it.

 

Adding to the difficulty were those around me dealt with loss in a completely different manner.  In my reality, loss was  an affront.  Loss happened to others.  It was not going to be part of my world because I knew I could not make it through such psychological pain.  There was no one I trusted because there was no one who had shown me they had a way to get through loss. My family taught the classic control of emotions as had been handed down for generations.  Emotional indulgence was considered a liability.  The world was  a tough place where others would prey on any show of "weakness".  I learned to "stuff" my feelings and compensate by developing an elaborate fantasy world of imagination in which I was invariably cast as a victim in need of a strong rescuer.

 

What I did not know and later discovered was that I had been born with the innate ability to survive loss and agony; an unsuspected  second wind is unleashed when driven by unspeakable intensity of emotion. I was taught by the wife of a good friend that grieving is a process and the way to go through it is to go through  In order to make a space to do this I must tell well meaning people who want to fix me that I am not broken and they must back off.  The first time I experienced the process of weaving the pain as a brightly colored thread into the tapestry of my life, I had an experienced and trusted guide.  The second time, I had my own map and did it at my own at my own pace. 

 

There is a story about a person who fell into a deep hole and cried out for help.  A passerby heard the cries and jumped into the hole.  The first person was horrified and said, "I needed help and you jumped in here and now we are both in a deep hole".  The jumper responded, "Yes, but I have been here before and I know the way out".

 

That is the person I want to have help from in my dark times.  Not someone who needs to fix me for their own purposes, but someone who knows the way out from personal experience. 

 

And those poppy extract bottles discovered in the garden, they are washed clean and make a lovely wind chime and my garden grows just fine now that the way is clear and I can see the seeds of hope again.