Trust

Many of us have suffered incredible loss in our lives which has tested our belief in self, the meaning of life and whether we could ever trust again. Could we open our hearts and souls again knowing we could be exposing ourselves to an even greater hurt?
Sometimes we find it easier to close our hearts. We live superficial lives, always protecting ourselves from being hurt again. But once we shut ourselves off, we never experience true love and without love there is nothing.
I learnt this lesson from a very vulnerable period in my life; I had just become a teenager when my life was turned upside in the blink of an eye. I went to bed a normal teenager on May 16, 1976 but was awakened abruptly at 3.30 in the morning to see my mother frothing at the mouth, making a snoring sound that I was never to forget in my life and I knew deep down in my heart I had lost her. That she was never coming back to me. That the light in my life had been suddenly and unexpectedly snuffed out.
Despite knowing, I held on to the hope that she would come back. After all she had promised me the week before that she would never leave me. But she did. And what was worse was that she left me without even telling me goodbye. Without giving me a second chance to show her that I loved her and needed her. She left me broken. Wounded. Terrified. What was I meant to do without her light? She was my everything. So how could she be gone. Poof. Like magic. Disappeared.
It took me quite some time to come to terms with her sudden death. Some days I mourned her. Some days I hated her. Other days I treasured the time we had together.
It wasn’t until I was much older that I understood why I had chosen her knowing she would die. Her death frightened me so much that my heart closed. That I could not and dared not love anyone again as unconditionally and unequivocally as I had loved her. There is nothing that can match the love between a mother and her child. Yet this love had been ripped out of my chest just like that, without warning, over night.
I never thought I would be able to love so freely again. When the going got tough in my later relationships, I got out of there before my partner could leave me. I found it difficult to trust. To commit. I felt that every person that came into my life was temporary because I had learned that love does not last. Pain takes over and the darkness is all encompassing. So I learned to flee - my defence mechanism. No one was ever going to hurt me again. Not if I could help it.
It was only when I met my husband – someone who wanted to love me despite my scars, my flaws that I learned not to run. He took me to my mother’s grave. A place I had not been since her death sixteen years before. At first I saw no point of it. But went anyway. I stood there not knowing which grave was hers – her grave is unmarked. It was awkward. I felt nothing. We got back to the apartment and I stood in the closet and the dam broke. Tears I did not know I still had for her flowed. My body convulsed in grief. I sobbed for the thirteen year old girl that never grieved because she had to be strong. I cried for the twenty nine year old woman who stood at that closet door understanding for the first time that my mother had died to make me see that love does not die. It stays inside of us forever. I understood for the first time that she was telling me to trust and it will be okay. I understood that she had given me a gift of love that she could not give me when she was alive because she did not have the strength to trust her own inner voice. She gave me that gift by breaking my heart when I was very young so that I could mend and go on. She couldn’t do it when she was alive. She had six children. Her only escape was death.
I understood she was giving me the chance to right her wrong. To listen to my inner voice. The voice that told me on that ill fated night that she was not coming back. That she had gone. It was only then that I realised my husband was holding me tight. Not questioning. Just holding. Letting me grieve. Letting me learn that if I love and trust I will never have to flee again because love does not die. It lives forever.