DEATH AND GAPS by Lynn Marie Ramjass

Part Two concerning LOSS

                                                                                                                

                                                                  DEATH AND GAPS                                                                        

"There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them, my mother explained shortly before she left me.' If you can remember me, I will be with you always." Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

DEATH AND GAPS

By Lynn Marie Ramjass            

May 31, 2021

It is my experience during these significant losses, our thoughts are so convoluted, our feelings so out of whack, voices and sounds garbled, far and away, as though we are underwater and drowning. It is difficult to think straight or at all. The pain, the dark void in the loss particularly during the initial shock and again during the funeral. The incredible exhaustion that envelopes the mind, heart, and spirit afterwards, and especially the soul sucking pain. 

Our experiences are our greatest teachers. I have come to know and understand loss, grief, sorrow, a primal pain deep in one’s soul when a loved one dies, or a close relationship ends. A light extinguishes in our universe. A part of us dies too, as death changes people.

 There is a gap, an ever-present hole, and try as we might, will forever remain. We are changed! 

British author Jeanette Winterson wrote: “You’ll get over it. Its the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because “it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”

Death and gaps are topics I think of often and have since I was a child.

 I often wonder though, if a sudden death be more merciful and kinder for those who died as well as for those left behind, rather then watching them whither and die in excruciating pain for days, weeks, months, and some sadly, even years at a time.

 I imagine the pain, we who are left behind experience would not be any less intense either way, suddenly or via prolonged suffering. Is the loss not the same dreadful pain none the less, and the gap in our lives just as deep?

 If they were suffering horribly, would it not be selfish of us to want them to continue to suffer? When someone is taken from us without warning, it can often leave us with regrets for things possibly left unsaid and unresolved.

 If nothing else, the Covid 19-pandemic is a reminder that life is indeed fragile and short and any one of us can be taken at any time. There truly is little time to say the things we need and ought to say to people we care about whilst they are alive. Words matter little after we have died. Words have the power to comfort and to heal, to wound and to destroy. 

 It is my experience that when we truly, genuinely love someone, no matter what type of love that be, we accept that individual as they are and not how we imagine, expect, or hope they will be. We do not try to fix them, or save them, or change them, or mold them into a copy of oneself, how we live, or view the world. We meet them where they are at. We accept their beauty, goodness, and light as well as their faults, idiosyncrasies, shadow, and imperfections. We love and accept them, their brokenness, and their uniqueness precisely as God had made them, perfectly imperfect. 

D. H. Lawrence wrote: “It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick with it all of your life. Only at times, at times the gaps are filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.”

Anais Nin also wrote about gaps:” I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why; some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.” 

I strongly suspect you will understand and relate to those passages, to the times when the gaps are filled in, or left behind.

All these years, as the circle of life continue, and we edge closer to the grave. The final chapter of my life drawing ever closer to its conclusion. I wanted you to know that I will always be grateful for your having been such an important part of it. How thankful I am for the many moments with you when the gaps had been filled in. 

Sincerely,

Lynn Marie Ramjass

THOUGHTS ON LOSS by Lynn Marie Ramjass

Ian and Lynn Marie Ramjass

                                                      

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." Anais Nin  

                                      

June 3, 2021

I made this entry in my blog on what would have been my mother Patricia's 82 birthday. She died at 68 years old on December 2007, a week before Christmas. I am painfully aware of how difficult the last year and a half has been worldwide due to the pandemic. It does not help matters any when one lives with a serious mental illness like I do. If not for my mental health advocacy, art, writing, gardening, and  other activities that help keep me busy and sane, I could not cope with my bipolar disorder otherwise. I have a strong support system to help me through the challenging times and who bring me much happiness, light, and laughter. 

There are others who are far less fortunate and have no one. Hopefully, some of what I personally write will touch, motivate, inspire, or allow you to feel less alone. Being authentic and vulnerable takes courage. Living with Bipolar Disorder daily takes, strength, resiliency, tenacity, and an enormous amount of respect and unconditional love.

I have to say some of the truly beautiful, authentic persons I have ever met in my lifetime have been within the confines of the psychiatric wards, on my Facebook mental health public page LWBD (Living With Bipolar Disorder) and in our private mental health support group Living With Bipolar Disorder Closed Groups. Thank you to all for following us these last nine years and your support. Both were founded by me personally in April 2012.

 I had written Loss in the year 2000, after a conversation with my then psychiatrist Dr. Francis Lee. 

The second portion of the writing, the additional update only this year May 2021 which is entitled Death and Gaps and you may find that entry on this blog as well. It deals with death and the profound gaps or holes these losses leave in our lives.  

Perhaps you can relate and drop a comment and or share a personal experience. It is my hope that sharing my writing and experiences with Living with Bipolar 1 with psychosis these past 32 years (literally half my life) resonates with many of you.

Dr. Lee asked me a question no one had ever before asked me. "How do you deal with loss Lynn-Marie?  I must admit, the question floored me. And I did not know how to answer it straight away. He told me to think about it and we would discuss it at our next session. 

I drove home with that question reverberating in my brain. 

Once home, I sat across from my husband Ian, seated in a chair in our garage and told him what Dr. Lee had asked me. As I spoke to him, I felt something shift deep within in me, and soon burst into tears unable to control myself.  I realized for the first time, in all my life, I had never dealt with the losses, but rather pushed them and the pain aside. 

The many traumatic experiences were buried way down deep, suppressed, and repressed until I fell apart like Humpty Dumpty; one morning in a pdoc's (psychiatrist) office, curled in a fetal position in a chair across from his desk more exhausted than when I had given birth. It was June 6th of 1989. I was voluntarily seeing a pdoc for the very first time of my own volition and later that day, I was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit for the first time. Severely psychotic! 

Eleven years and three more psychotic episodes and three different hospitals later, a multitude of doctors and a succession of medications before my meeting with Dr. Francis Lee changed my life. 

He became the first pdoc to actually listen and help me. He prescribed a mood stabilizer Epival 500 mg twice a day that thankfully, worked for me. I am still on it to this day. It is the only medication I take. The morning when we spoke of loss, Dr. Lee opened a door to a new beginning for me. For me to walk through it, I had to first deal with my painful past.

Not a single solitary person asked how I dealt with loss until Dr. Lee and I found one another. How one deals with loss is a great and important question. 

Can you relate to the loss? If so, share your thoughts! I am lapsed Catholic writing a letter to someone I lost an exceptionally long time ago who meant a great deal to me. This is NOT a forum to debate spirituality or religion. It is part of how I got through one of the most painful losses of my life and my experience.

I wrote it decades ago and reworded some of it. I do not know if your therapist, if you see one that is, ever had you do grief therapy and asked you to imagine a person sitting across from you whom you lost, or with whom you have a complicated relationship, and asked what you would say to them if they were there seated before you? Or if anyone asked you to write a letter and then either burn it, or tear it up, or store it away? The main thing is expressing your feelings, your anger and your pain and letting it out in healthy and constructive ways. My letter was mailed to that individual shortly after it was written. I have no idea if she ever received or even read it. But it was important that I wrote it for my sake and not hers. You may read it, or not read it.

The following is what emerged when I thought about it in relation to lost relationships. I have lost numerous friends either by death or unable to continue their friendship with me. But one in particular relationship truly devastated me. It was the first major loss of my life, very much like a death. It ended bitterly as I always knew that it would and it took me years to come to terms with the loss.

LOSS

By Lynn-Marie Ramjass

Perhaps, I write to you to keep my memory alive, so that you will not forget me completely. Writing to you is like visiting the grave of an old friend. I know I will not receive a response, but I am able to talk to you as though you are still here. I may say what I need to say without interruption. I have often wondered, if it would have hurt less had one of us died rather than our relationship? The death of a close friend is painful, as I had previously experienced this with my friend Grace, but the death of a friendship, especially one as close as ours (yours and mine) had been, hurt far more. When the person dies, they take your love with them. The love does not die. It lives on. I am curious to know your opinion on this, but of course, I shall never know as I have been dead to you now for many years, decades in fact.

For me, it is far easier to accept the death of a friend than that of a relationship. There are those who will argue this point. I suppose it depends on the person and the depth of the relationship. To be rejected by someone you dearly love and care for, in my opinion and experience, it hurts far more. The saddest thing in the world must be to continue to love and care about someone who no longer loves or cares about you. Plato believed unrequited love to be the most painful. And there are many types and degrees of love.

There are times I awake from sleep to find that I had been crying. I am often unable to recall what I dreamt. The warm, wet tears stream down my face and I am filled with a profound sense of sadness and an intense longing in my heart for something lost. Something I deeply loved. Something I dearly valued. There are times I experience a spiritual dryness, wilderness periods in my prayer life. There are times I struggle with prayer. Times it seems I have forgotten how to pray. Times it seems God Himself has turned his back. Times I question my faith, my values and my sanity.

I read ardently and there are scores of books in my library. Favourite topics of interests were the saints especially the mystics like Joan of Arc, St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and many, many more. They experienced visions most people never experience or could ever possibly imagine. Their teachings reveal so much about the human spirit, suffering and humility. I believe we are put here to love and to help one another. The saints teach so much about love, friendship and servitude. Ultimately, we are here to serve God, our higher power, however we imagine it to be and one another. St. Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Catholic nun and mystic confesses having intense struggles with prayer, her book Interior Castle was both comforting and informative for me a lapsed Catholic.

 I have had great difficulty accepting the estrangement between us as being the will of God. I could not accept that it was I who had foolishly thrown away our friendship. I could not accept that you did not love nor care about me or my family anymore. I read St. Augustine's Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence in which her writes, "All that happens to us in this world against our will (whether due to men or to other causes) happens to us only by the will of God, by the disposal of Providence, by His orders and under His guidance; and if from the frailty of our understanding we cannot grasp the reason for some event, let us attribute it to divine Providence, show Him respect by accepting it from His hand, believe firmly that He does not send it without cause."

I think about this often. My favourite verse from scripture is "All things work together for good, for those who love God and who are called according to His purpose." Romans. 8:28. I have prayed for the grace to bear this trial, those currently in my life and those to come with patience and fortitude. No matter if I should ever see you again. Sometimes, I experience what St. John of the Cross described as The Dark Night of the Soul, as you well know, there is no consolation in those moments. It is as though God Himself has turned his back. No matter how holy we are. No matter how holy we think we are. It is one of the deepest and most genuine human afflictions and experience. It is so important that Christ Himself had to experience this, complete and utter darkness, isolation. Christ felt this as He gave up His spirit. For to know God fully we must also feel His absence. Though Christ knew the Father, he had to know, up close and personal, that human separation. We cannot know joy without sorrow, light without darkness, life without death, and the many other dichotomies that life entails.

St. Thomas Aquinas book, Treatise on the Virtues, explores the ways that people develop the skills to make good and wise decisions. "First", he said, "individuals must do all that they can to reconstruct past experiences realistically. This initial step is the most slippery one because a person's memories can be selective. For various reasons, people tend to remember only negative past experiences, or only the good, and second, to be "open-minded". I realize how true this is and as you well know,  I tended to remember the negative. I could never enjoy the moments and never felt worthy of joy and happiness. The bipolar disorder left such a distorted impression of myself and the world around me. I now try to remind myself to pray before making any decisions, especially major ones. I ask myself what is the loving thing to do? Often it requires great sacrifice.

In reading The Autobiography of St. Theresa of Lisieux, the following passage reminded me of our past friendship: "It was not long before I saw that they just did not understand my kind of love. She did not understand how I loved her...Yet God has made me so that once I love. I love forever, and so I continue to pray for this girl and I love her still."

My eyes welled with tears as I continued reading these blessed words: " I am profoundly grateful to Jesus who has never let me find anything but bitterness in earthly friendships...I have seen so many souls, dazzled by this deluding light, fly into it and burn their wings like silly moths. Then they turn again to the true unfading light of love and with new more splendid eyes, fly to Jesus the divine Fire which burns but does not destroy."

How her words touched my heart, alighted the deep, dank, dark, corridors of my mind; and lifted my soul from the abyss of despair and self loathing. Gone was the grief over lost friendships and failed relationships. I now understood that people, friends, and family, loved me to the best of their knowledge, experience and ability, especially you, the friend whom I loved best and in my heart of hearts, I know genuinely at one time, loved me too!! 

I realize now that you would never understand the way in which I loved you. I love you still and undoubtedly, I always will. As I love all who entered and exited my life, either by choice, or by no fault of their own, as American poet E.E Cummings wrote: "I carry you in my heart!"

Lynn-Marie