Season of the Fallen Sun
by
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Some of my time I spend ruminating on, and waiting for the fulfillment of promises, made by well-intentioned fools. Too many well-intentioned, sad eyed people have said, “Give it time. It will get better with time.” Although I am not inclined to believe that two months is the amount of time that they are referring to; I sometimes want to ask them, “When? How much time exactly? What have you calculated to be the appropriate time when this gets better?” I also want to ask them, “Within the context of this time, should I be doing something; or would it be better to just sit motionless and let good old time just keep passing; until one day I get to the appropriate intersection where time meets, being healed?” I really am not angry with these people, although it seems that way in my tone. I am genuinely inquisitive, because lately, this time thing has intrigued me. I have been fascinated by the whole idea of it. I often sit motionless and just play time concertos in my mind. There are numerous pieces that I can play in major or minor chords; depending on if time is an adjective or if time is a noun. The word time is one of the words that we use in our language that has so many different uses. Time is one of the longest definitions I could find in our New Dictionary of The American Language – Second Edition.
If you could climb into my brain you would probably want to run screaming. Each of my thoughts about time, both the adjective time, and the noun time, are riding around in little miniature race cars. Each car has a unique driver. The driver’s have different skills, strengths, opinions, strategies, and beliefs regarding the race. There are hundreds of these high performance cars speeding down some European autobahn. Each car is jockeying for position, and speeding toward some sort of destination identified as the place, the time, where the intense hurting stops. This may be why so many people I have met who are deeply grieving, fear that they are crazy. I feel crazy with all these racing thoughts cluttering up the autobahn of my brain.
Because I am in this “crazy” place, I am struggling to get you to understand it. Perhaps if you can understand it, then I can feel less crazy. Yet how does a person who is in this crazy place, step out of the crazy long enough, to find language that can competently explain what feeling crazy feels like. Perhaps it would be easier if I introduced you to the drivers of the cars, who continue to yak at me, while racing through my brain at dangerously high speeds. They are in no particular order, and there are a variety of speakers. These are the drivers, or at least what they keep yakking:
“Our time together was not long enough!”
“Time is critical here, we need to get past a 72 hour window before we can even plan treatment. It is wait and see right now.”
“ As mandated by the State of NY, time of death was declared at 11:30AM”
“Will there ever be a time that we genuinely feel happy again?”
“ I want our groundhog day to be the 24 hours we were in the hospital. I want to go back to that time. At least he was alive then and I could touch him.”
“What time did he leave the party?”
“You need to understand that some time passed before Mercy Flight could get to him. During that time, his brain was deprived of oxygen.”
“I know I will be getting better when I can make a plan for the future, and the plan involves planning something that I look forward to, something where I know I will have a good time.”
“It is too long, you have been gone too long! Stop it Andy! It is time for you to come home! Please come home now!”
“Time was, I looked forward to Easter, and really any excuse to have a holiday party, and to cook a big meal. That time has passed.”
“What is taking so much time? I know he is dead. When will they come out and tell us, so that I can collapse into this agony that I am already too familiar with.”
“It was his time. That is just the way it is, when it’s your time, it’s your time.”
“We will call you with the time of the (blank). You can fill in the blank with just about anything. There is a memorial event at Aquinas at the Mission Bouts, there is another memorial at SUNY Buffalo. There is a memorial tree planting ceremony. There is the garden dedication. How many times will we memorialize? Each of these times is bittersweet; painful yet comforting. Sometimes it feels like too many, and at the same time, there can never be enough.”
“Time is standing still. The pages on the calendar turn, but I am frozen in time.”
“In his short lifetime, he accomplished much!”
“The actual time I spend in an emotional meltdown is less, but the intensity is as great if not greater than in the beginning.”
“If I could only turn back time.”
“Christmas time. It will forever be the “best of times, and the worst of times.”
“At times, I actually feel OK, not great, but OK.”
“My life now is about killing time.”
“What time is it? Each night I wake up at the same time. I just can’t sleep beyond that point.”
And then some wiser voice in my head, says, “Stop thinking about time. Time is finite. You will be together in eternity. Eternity is infinite.”
With this last car and driver showing up, the cars on the autobahn temporarily slow down to normal speeds. It is almost as if they are going through a cool down, like a runner cools down on a treadmill. The cars disappear and my brain reverts back to simple thoughts. The nature of the thoughts is no longer racing. For now my crazy time is over, at least until the cars fuel up again and start the race anew.
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About the Book
When confronted with a sudden and tragic loss, we are catapulted into a world of darkness. Everything that once held meaning is challenged, and it becomes necessary to redefine the largest and smallest concepts of life. Even the simplest everyday words no longer retain their meaning. Words can become elaborate worlds of their own. Season of the Fallen Sun is one mother’s journey through word worlds like beginnings, listen, time, reconstruction, respite, and hope. It is a story of how the exploration of those worlds can impact healing and recovery, even at a time when healing and recovery seem inconceivable. While this is a personal story, it is simultaneously a universal human story. Every human being unwillingly buys a ticket on the ride called heartbreak. While every person’s journey when confronted with heartbreak, is different; there are aspects that will at the very least, feel the same. Although life will never be the same, in the places where it is different, we can still find life and living.
About the Author
Trina Laughlin is a licensed clinical social worker who has focused her twenty-plus-year career on trauma. She has spoken nationally and is the co-author of The Power of Story – A Process of Renewal for Therapists Who Treat Trauma (2005). She resides in Rochester, New York.