“Spirituality means awakening. Most people, even if they don’t know it, are asleep.”
– Anthony de Mello, Conscience; the dangers and opportunities of reality
On the afternoon of Thursday, September 28, 2000, I had a discussion with my husband, John, a police officer, about my habit of putting off writing.
We were at the dog park and I said, “I’m so scared I’m going to wake up in twenty years and still not have finished writing a book.”
John turned to me and said, “You’re probably right about that…as long as you know that was your choice.”
Oh.
But at the time, we’d been together for twelve years…that’s a long time to hear someone talk about their dream of becoming a writer, but doing very little in the way of actual writing.
After the dog park, we went home and John took a nap before going to work at 9:00 pm Before I went to bed, I promised myself, again, that I would get up early the next morning and write an hour before I got back. to my usual work at 7 am. In those days, I was working as a civilian for the same police service as John. I was a reports processor and took incident reports from officers over the phone.
But when my alarm clock went off at 5:00 am the next morning, I reached over and hit the snooze button. I do not want to wake up. I don’t feel like writing. I don’t want to go back to my job either. Why do I have to write police reports for a living?
Ten minutes later, the alarm rang again. I hit the snooze button. I don’t want to get up I can’t write today. I am too tired.
Ten minutes later, the alarm sounded; The replay was hit. I’m so anxious! I do not like my job. I don’t want to go back there.
Me neither. Because during that exact same period of time that I was hitting the snooze button, John was lying on the floor of a warehouse canteen, dying of a brain injury. He had responded to a break-in complaint in a warehouse and was searching the mezzanine for an intruder when he went through an unmarked drop ceiling and fell nine feet into the dining room below. No safety railing had been put up to warn him, or anyone else, of the danger.
The complaint turned out to be a false alarm; there was no intruder in the building. My wake-up call, however, was devastatingly real.
My soul had been awakened to a new reality. I was a thirty-two-year-old widow entitled to my husband’s salary for the rest of my life. As an aspiring writer, this was a dream come true. As a woman in love, it was a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from.
Death took my soul mate; life caught my attention.
Two weeks later, I began writing what would become the book A Widow’s Awakening. It took me 8 years, a dozen rewrites, and an ocean of tears to get it (and me) where it needed to be for publication. But I did it. And frankly, the process of writing the damn thing probably not only saved me, it showed me the way OUT of the grievance.
John’s sudden and easily preventable death made me realize how precious life is and how quickly it can end. We may think we have all the time in the world to do what we’re here to do… but that may not be the case.
Losing John almost killed me. There were days when I wished it were. But it was not like that. In fact, his death gave me a new and beautiful life, but not the one he had planned. And yet, from the moment I was first told of his fall, along with the pain, shock, and fear, there was also a powerful sense of inevitability about everything that was happening… as if a small voice inside me will whisper: “And here we go.”
Maybe because:
“Your soul knows the geography of your destiny.”
– John O’Donohue, Anam Cara; A Book of Celtic Wisdom
Fortunately, loss is not the only way to awaken the soul to the reality that our time here is finite, so we had better make the most of our lives, but it certainly is an effective way. Or rather, it can be.
Because at the end of the day (or of a life, a relationship, a career, a dream), choosing how to move on after a loss is always a choice.