Moving Forward Means Embracing Difference
For months now, I’ve avoided using the term ‘moving on’ to describe my grief process. The logic goes something like this: ‘moving on’ implies that somehow I’ll get over Chelsea’s death if I simply wait long enough, and that I can pick up my life and keep moving down the same path I was on when she died. By that description, I can never move on. I’ll never get over this, which is an important lesson I think for folks who haven’t experienced this magnitude of loss. You never get over it, you just get further from it, and it hurts less over time, even though it still hurts. And I’ll never be able to simply pick my life back up and move down the same road. I had the perfect life on the path that involved Chelsea. Absent her, that path no longer works, and trying to recreate my previous life seems destined to fail.
So instead, I use the term ‘moving forward along a different path’ to describe my journey. Forward implies that life continues with, hopefully, a positive, growth-minded trajectory, and the different path element reflects the life shift. While this distinction may seem a matter of semantics, I’m exercising the mental habits that Chelsea (who was a professor of Rhetoric and Composition) drilled into me all those years: be precise with language, to the point where every word has meaning.
Moving forward it is.
However, that still leaves the question of where this new path leads, and how it will be different from the previous path. Thus far, the impulse has been to embrace the new and different opportunities that this path affords. Marriage does constraint one’s life in certain ways, and those constraints have lifted from my life, even if I didn’t want them to, meaning new opportunities.
But what to do with these opportunities? In thinking about this notion of different, I’m quickly realizing that a tension exists between my old life and my new life. While I can’t recreate my old life, it does seem silly to abandon everything that I’ve learned in my 40 years. Aspects of my life philosophy and experiences will probably serve useful moving forward, and I suspect many of my interests/likes will remain, even after Chelsea. So while I know I need to open myself to new and different opportunities, I wonder along which dimensions of my life different becomes an asset.
Do I make an orthogonal shift in my career trajectory? If ever I was going to make a left turn, now seems like the best time to do it. But I wonder if I’ve got the emotional reserves to enter into an entirely different field, which suggest maybe doing something familiar in the near term.
Do I stay in my current home town, or move somewhere radically different? Again, now would be the time to do so, and it’s not lost on my that I’m living the first 20 minutes of Sleepless in Seattle. But is that the right move for my daughter and I? Chelsea had a nomadic impulse, much more than I did, so is embracing that a way to leverage different? Or, in such a dramatic time, should I use the stability of our home to help us find our footing along this new path?
No clue. No clue about any of these questions. But I suppose, in the spirit fo struggling with the right questions, these are the right questions to be asking in this moment. And simply being aware of this notion of embracing different should be helpful.
