June 10, 2021

What I know about Love after Losing my Daughter in a Tragic Accident.

I could never have known what it would mean to lose Iluka.

The possibility of something bad happening to her was a fear deep in my heart, but it wasn’t an outcome I saw as part of our story. Not so soon, never so final. There was nothing to prepare me for the harsh reality of our frailness that was delivered by my car as it rolled back into us.

A false move, built up upon an accumulation of events, a life in autopilot. Ticking boxes, numbing my truth, doing for the sake of doing, to feel worthy, for my life to make sense somehow. I was doing the best I could with what I knew at the time, and I am still here trying to do the best I can with what I know now. But her death, with her blood left stained on my hands, in an instant, all the concerns I had been so utterly mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted by were obliterated, astonishingly meaningless.

Now what I would do to go back to those tender days, to lightly just allow myself to exist within the quiet moments we shared alone together, the ones I could not comprehend at the time were so incredibly significant. I always thought we had more time, and I could barely find solitude from the idea of it needing to be more. Lost in trains of thought, life somehow kept dragging by.

 

 

We focus everything outward as to not have to make peace with the confusion around what we are really doing here.

Ultimately the most meaningful aspects of our lives are the parts we don’t allow ourselves to relish and feel valid within. We struggle to grasp that the richness we seek is found in the seemingly too simple and undervalued facets of our lives; in the slowing down to be intimate with our wildness, with the messy flow of our journey, with what is right in front of us, rather than constantly pushing forwards to an objective, to an ending. Because we’re rarely left satisfied once we reach the summit set by our mind.

It seems life is urgently trying to teach us to be here, to truly arrive and soak in the rawness of its mystery, before it all slips silently away.

When I look back I am just glad for the tender way we loved each other, love is what has kept me going, always love.

~

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