The 20th Friday

Dear WEb,

Last night was the 20th Friday since Phoenix was brutally shot and killed. I have been distraught about this. How can it be 5 months that I have lived beyond that experience!!? I am one month away from being directly 'across the Wheel' from March 19th! In now looking across the Wheel, I see myself one month before he is shot. We are together. Phoenix is alive. We are alive together. I am alive in a way I may never be again. The whole thing makes me weak with sobbing and despair.

So, this morning as I hand form turkey patties to bake for Beetle, I sobbed great big tears of despair. I wondered if I have already lived the best part of my life and now it's pretty much over, or at least the joyous part. I'm in the cross-current of Life insisting on going on (The Wheel does keep turning!) and the intense currents of my overwhelming grief that is screaming STOP this turning--I cannot go on! This living is unlivable without Phoenix! It's empty and it's profoundly alone, no matter how many are loving me fiercely through.

And, yet, I pick up another turkey patty and form it, place it on the pan until I have 12, then into the oven. I wait 18 minutes until the timer goes off, then I retrieve them from the oven. I look out the window and see my lawn being mowed. I see a slight breeze through the green. How can this be? How can this be? Growth, Wheel turning AND profound desolation that only seems to deepen, not lessen.

I have been listening again to Rosanne Cash this morning. She has an album called "The Wheel" and a song about rising from the ashes("I'm gonna rise from the ashes...") that played during my deep sobbing and cooking for Beetle. How absurd, I think, this notion of rising from these ashes of desolation that I feel. I have risen many times from others, but this one...this one is different. I do not think I will ever recover. Yes, I do remember all I've written over the last many months in this WEb log...the hope and the despair. And...I do not think I will recover in spite of the more hopeful places I have been. I am that sure today. And still, as Rosanne Cash sang those words of being a Phoenix rising from the ashes, I let myself be slightly, ever so slightly, open to the radical possibility that somewhere across the Wheel I might look across at some point and glance at myself rising, somehow. The notion is quite absurd. And...

And, I go on somehow to the next thing to do or see or experience. Without Phoenix. And I fall into more tears, more sobbing, more despair. Remember, this is still walking the labyrinth, I hear myself.

Ok, dear one who keeps going on The Wheel,
Melissa