Through The Gates

I created this blog to give me someplace to write about loss and the process of working through grief.  A little over 18 months ago, me darlin' wife took her life.  It was the single most shattering experience of my life.  All of a sudden I went from having achieved pretty much everything I'd set out to do to feeling like the earth beneath my feet had split, cracked, and spun away in a hail of pieces and dust.

This isn't a blog that will be all happy and cheerful and upbeat.  I won't just be focusing on the tremendous growth I've done and how I've come to appreciate life and love and the people (and other beings) around me.  I'm creating this blog to be a place where I can be honest about this journey.  Sure, there will be some positive things in it.  There are also going to be posts that are bleak, posts that are angry, posts that are despairing, and posts that are downright sad.  Some of the posts here will deal with adult topics that, yes, include sex.  And before you start getting all worked up, no, this is not going to be material you can turn to for happy spankin' times.  If you want that, either go search somewhere else or, better yet, grow up!  So far, trying to create a bullshit, happy impression of how I'm doing or seeing things hasn't worked, and it's been one that I've rejected.  The only thing I reckon that will get me through all of this is, above all else, to be honest.

In the journey through Hell described by Dante, and later in two other books by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the only way out is to go down and through all the layers of Hell.  Sometimes that means suffering.  Sometimes it means pain.  Sometimes it means questioning everything that's been believed before.  So far, it seems like that is true with this grief journey as well.  I have no way to know for sure what lies ahead.  There are no roadmaps that tell anyone what this journey will hold.  Everyone's walk will be unique to themselves.  I don't have Virgil to guide and protect me on the way through.  However, I also firmly believe that the only thing that will keep me from going through it is my choice to stop moving.

I'm putting this up in part for myself.  I've got a private journal that I keep offline where I record what I'm not willing to share with anyone else.  However, I'm also feeling that it's gotten to be time to put some things out there for others.  I wish I was the last person to have to deal with this kind of tragedy.  Sadly, I've gotten to see that I'm not.  If I can't spare anyone else that kind of agony, then I'll take it as the next best thing to be able to offer some of what I've learned and come to see to help them through, too.  And if it ends up being of benefit to someone who has a friend or family member or loved one dealing with a similar loss....I'm good with that.

Dante wrote, toward the beginning of The Inferno:

"Through me the way is to the city dolent;
  Through me the way is to eternal dole;
  Through me the way among the people lost.

Justice incited my sublime Creator;
  Created me divine Omnipotence,
  The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.

Before me there were no created things,
  Only eterne, and I eternal last.
  All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"

Well, it's time to walk through.