Walk with me

You walk with me
Each breath I take
You dance with me
Each move I make

Beside the stream
Our hands entwined
I see so clear
Your heart and mine

Each thought of you
Love fills my heart
So close we are
So far apart

Margot Hill
30 Apr 09

This is the interior text to an email that I sent to someone who is learning to live with the same grief I have. If you read me regularly you know I add these occasionally in addition to the poetry and other sidebars of life because this is a part of who I am and what made and makes my poetry speak. I know how important it can be that just one person out there knows that there is someone out there that can listen, hear and walk with them. If with my poetry or journal I touch or help in someone's life it is worth sharing the inner parts of who I am.

I want you to know that when Stephen died I as lucky if I went 5 seconds with out thinking about him, by 6 months I as maybe making it 5 minutes. If I could carry on a conversation for half an hour (most of my conversations were a lot shorter) then whoever I was speaking with could expect to hear about Stephen at least a couple of times. More if I felt it had a place in the conversation (and no I didn't care if others thought it didn't have a place), actually to be honest no one even at work, we worked together, ever told me to stop grieving, to not talk about him although a couple of people did think I needed help in coping and did what they could to get me some assistance. I don't know that I needed the help as much as they needed to feel like I was getting some but that was okay both they and I had an outside source that could make sure that I was not going over the wall. Okay I think I went well off topic there but I hope you get my point. Half an hour without speaking or thinking of Stephen did not happen at 6 months for me and if people don't like hearing that in my conversation then too bad. I heard a few of those remarks from others and although I can not defend nor do I wish to the words or the knife wound they inflict I had to remind myself when I heard them that they often came from people that did not know Stephen, did not understand his life or his pain, could not possibly understand the love we shared, did not know even a single iota of the sharing of souls that he gave to me because if they did know even a small part of all of these things they would never in a million years say such words. I was and am blessed by loving and being loved by Stephen. Yes, he is dead but his love for me is not and my love for him is not, and if some people don't understand that then I feel sorry, very sorry for them because I have that certainty and that love forever. I too found Stephen much further along in my life and his than we had any reason to guess that we would find each other (I was 34 and he was 46 when we met) or that it would work out but we did and it did but our love, as strong and powerful as it was toward the end was human and uncertain at the beginning and it could not possibly heal every wound in Stephen's soul overnight. God's love in heaven may work that fast but ours on earth takes time and time was one thing Stephen didn't have enough of. He didn't have enough time to heal before depression and it's side effect, suicide, took him away from me and to God to finish the healing his soul needed. Things don't get easier in the first 6 months, at least not for many of us, sometimes it seems like the first year is all about it getting harder. So many times we relive "that moment" until we come to recognize it will never be "that moment" again. As bad as the bad moments are, and they can be very bad, the "reliving" of that moment will change. We begin to anticipate it. We know it's coming which in someways makes the waiting worse but in someways makes the anticipated moment less than the tragedy we anticipate. You will get to a place, although no one can tell you when, when you realize that as much as you hurt it doesn't hurt as much as that moment when you knew you had lost the love of your life.

Margot
Walking forever with Stephen 7/17/51-7/12/01

Sitting in the dark

I sit here
In the quiet
Thinking of you

My breath
A warm wind
Calls your name

Where are you?
In the dark mist
You wander

And the whisper
My heart hears
Makes no sound

Margot Hill
4Apr2009