Part I: Falling
When I was fifty years old, I fell apart, but that is not the main subject of my book. The book is mostly about my recovery, my finding and following a healing path to a stronger, better, and happier self than I had known I could be.
Part I, Falling, lays the groundwork for the pages that follow by briefly tracing the events that led to my emotional, spiritual, and physical collapse. They represent three categories of loss, plus the combined effect of loss upon loss.
Some losses come gradually. We may see "the handwriting on the wall" that predicts it, and cling to the hope that we're mistaken. The loss of a job, a business, or a home, or the death of a beloved person or pet from advanced age or illness, can happen this way. In my case, it was the end of my marriage. The loss may have been a long time coming, and my grieving already begun. Still, when it happened, and all hope and denial were finally stripped away, I experienced shock and disbelief.
Then there are losses that arrive through betrayal, the sudden awareness that someone we trusted was lying. Again, shock and disbelief. These are the losses that come from promises broken, lies
uncovered, expectations revealed to be impossible. The loss of dreams,
our hopes dashed, can be deeply painful and cause us to grieve. The relationship that followed my divorce ended this way. "Why," I asked myself later, "didn't I see this one coming?" I didn't know whether I would ever be able to trust again.
Then there's traumatic loss, the "bolt from the blue" that changes life suddenly, completely, and forever. Sometimes it's a stroke or other medical event that kills or leaves us, or someone close to us, helpless: a fire that destroys our home, takes lives; or an accidental death, suicide, or homicide. In my case, it was the violent death of my daughter. That loss left me broken, devastated.
It happens. Eventually we all experience loss and grief of different kinds, at different times in our lives, and when it happens, something shifts inside us. When many losses happen at once or in quick succession, grief piles upon grief, and healing becomes a challenge of daunting proportions. I scarcely knew what to grieve first, or how to deal with the flattening hurricane of emotions that assaulted me.
When it happened to me, each loss brought me down, down, lower and lower, as I fell from happiness into total confusion and uselessness, emotionally laid waste.
Part I is about this Falling. At the end of it, there was no place else to go but up. As when falling down a well the force of gravity takes us to the bottom, and we have to fight against that force to climb up and out of where the falling has taken us, so too while my falling was caused by events outside myself, the healing would depend on me.
