We Made it, Part 2

One of the more powerful elements of my initial reaction when Chelsea died wasn’t a reaction of pain: it was a reaction of love.

In the first few days/weeks (once the shock wore off), I felt an overwhelming sense of love, almost like Chelsea was wrapping a warm blanket around me to protect me from the frigidity of loss. It was an odd feeling, contributing to my sense of disorientation, but it was a welcome gift, all things considered.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when I received a similar gift last week, in conjunction with the one-year anniversary of her death.

I’ll start the story of this gift with a fun, meteorological coincidence: the recent weather in Coastal California has been remarkably like fall on the east coast, where I grew up. Usually in October, Coastal CA is dry, warm, and cloudless; nice to be sure, but not what I used to associate with the fall. This year however, the days have been crisp, we’ve had some east-coast like cloud cover, and the late afternoons remind me of my childhood in North Carolina.

So wind the clock back to last Sunday afternoon, when the weather was hitting peak east-coast October: crisp air, patchy cloud cover + low sun = golden rays of light peaking through the clouds, even a little bit of color from the vineyards and the spotty deciduous trees in this part of the world. It was the perfect afternoon.

I decided to take E for drive out to the vineyard to pick up a shipment of wine (because that’s what we do in this part of the world), so we headed out into wine country. As we drove through the hills, I experienced a sensation of warmth, almost identical to the feeling I had last year when Chelsea died. That feeling, then and now, was powerful, a feeling of love that echoed the beautiful, natural background.

And adjacent to that feeling, I had another powerful feeling: I felt like Chelsea was smiling at us, from wherever/whenever she may be in the Cosmos. It was like she was looking down on us, sending us golden rays of light through the clouds, and giving us both a great big hug. It was wonderful.

Inside my head, I ‘told’ her, “We made it. We got through this first year. E and I are going to be okay.”

Now for the record, I don’t know what that feeling means, nor do I know to whom I was ‘talking’ inside my head. My lack of a spiritual belief system, with which I’ve grappled in the last year, puts me in the odd position of feeling something profound, but lacking a way to understand that feeling. While my natural inclination is to try and understand my experiences, I’ve learned this year that I have to be content sitting with my grief without necessarily understanding it. These feelings serve a purpose, even if I don’t know what that purpose may be.

Still, whatever that Sunday feeling was, it was powerful, and I find it significant that I’ve experienced such feelings at these critical moments in my journey. There’s a narrative out there with a hopeful story about what happened to Chelsea, and about where she may be today. I hope that story is true: I hope that she was in fact smiling at us, that she’s with us every day, looking down on us from wherever/whenever she may be.

But regardless of what may or may not be true, I’ve learned to accept gifts like those of last Sunday for what they are: feelings that, at least for a brief moment, connect me to Chelsea in a way that’s now rare.

And, to be frank, I love that, on the one-year anniversary of such a traumatic event, I experienced a gift of love and grace that made me feel warmth instead of pain. That’s the perfect way to capture who Chelsea was, and what her influence continues to be.