Two Months

by Tracey Flower

“When grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.”  ~Samuel Johnson

I realized yesterday that I have been home for exactly one month. I also realized that it has been two months since everything fell apart. Two months. Every second of those months felt like an eternity but now when I stand looking back at them I’m shocked that it has already been two months.

Hello again Vail. The Gore Range from my balcony.

A friend of mine said to me the other day that she’s glad I’m back and it feels like I never left. I feel the opposite. To my friends I was only gone for a little over a month, which I understand is an insignificant amount of time when life is carrying on as it has been with few glitches or bumps; at the end of which they were all pretty much the same as they were at the start. For me, on the other hand, that month changed everything and my first thought in response to my friend’s comment was along the lines of I feel like I’ve been gone for a lifetime because every day I feel the weight of the events of that month and every day they affect me.

Two months, two seconds even, can change everything and, as I pick myself up off the floor and start moving forward again I take comfort in that fact because I have a glimmer of hope that sometimes the change that comes is good. My life is still turned upside down and still changing but I have lived through the last two months and I will live through the next two.

And just as I will keep living I will keep writing. Flower Blog will continue to grow and change the more I live and learn and I hope you will continue to read as that happens. Please feel free to share your comments and suggestions to me along the way.

Like this post? You might also enjoy One Sunset at a Time.

And Home Again (From Flower Blog Two: Stories From Down Under)

My time in Melbourne has come to an end. I was there just over two weeks but it felt like months. I was going to live and work in Australia initially because someone I loved asked me to go there and because I wanted to be with him. Now that I no longer have that person in my life I know that living and working in Australia is not something I want to do. I also know that I had to go to Australia despite my loss, if only for a short time, so that my loss could become real to me. It was like going to the funeral of the relationship that has just died. I had to go to say good-bye.

Farewell Melbourne. The city from St. Kilda Pier.

When I left Michigan for Melbourne I was in shock. I had been dumped and rejected quite coldly and it was devastating. Everything I had believed to be true was false and everything I had been looking forward to for the past few months was gone. This was, and still is, a lot to take and it makes me feel light and dizzy and wonder if I’m dreaming. And so, I believe my mind went into shock to keep me moving forward, to protect me from pain that might have been too intense to handle right away.

The shock wore off quickly when I got to Melbourne. What I have lost became real to me there and grief set in. I sat in the bedroom I was renting while Melbourne’s winter gloom loomed outside and let my grief make itself known. And I cried. I sobbed and sobbed and I let the grief become part of me. I wandered and explored the city by myself and let all the aspects of my grief appear, the heartache, the loneliness, and the anger. I made the decision to return home almost immediately but I let it twist and turn in my mind for a while to give it time to separate from the grief (because let’s be honest, grief itself doesn’t always make the best decisions). I went to Australia with a sick feeling in my gut and while I have returned with my grief in tow, that sick feeling is gone and I at least feel calm and content that my purpose for being there was fulfilled and home is where I should be right now.

I keep thinking about the insect exhibit in the Melbourne Museum. There is an area dedicated to all the large, ugly, and slightly terrifying spiders that call Australia home. Next to the live tarantulas is a display of one of the largest of these beasts’ old skins. It seems tarantulas have the same habit of shedding their exoskeleton as they grow as snakes. It made me wonder if these creatures are aware of this shedding as it is taking place, if they know how hideous they look when it’s happening and if it hurts at all. I wonder if they know that they are growing and that when they finally lose that old skin they will be changed, they will be larger and stronger.

I feel like a tarantula right now. I have returned home in poor shape. I’ve lost weight and sleep and I have a bad cold. Every time I look in the mirror at the moment I’m shocked to see the person looking back at me. I don’t recognize her, she looks drained, this person, she looks pale and weary and it’s hard to believe this person is me. I look back at photos of myself taken in Moab just weeks ago when I started this blog and I also have a hard time believing the person in those photos is me. I don't feel like her anymore and the truth is I will never be her again. I’m in transition right now and I’m growing, which isn’t always a particularly pretty process and is usually quite painful, but when it’s finished the shell of who I used to be will remain and I will crawl out of it still me but changed and, hopefully, stronger.



This will be my last post on this blog. My time in Australia is done and it’s time to move on to new adventures. I have plenty more stories to tell and thoughts to share, though, so stay tuned.

NOTE: To read about what I learned last time I visited Australia read Breathe.

When Plans Change (From Flower Blog Two: Stories From Down Under)

I’m a planner. I’m obsessive about organization and insist on writing everything down. I panic a little when I don’t have a plan. One of the hardest things about being this way is realizing, over and over again, that sometimes the powers that be have no regard for my plans. Really lousy things can happen; you lose your job, someone close to you dies, you love someone and he confesses he no longer loves you. It’s life and it’s not fair and there’s really no way to plan for these things. To do so would be very strange.

My Australia plans have changed before the trip even began. I was supposed to be in Sydney right now, I was supposed to leave early this week and I didn’t. I’m now leaving early next week for Melbourne. If you’re close to me or know someone close to me you know how and why this change happened. Perhaps I’ll share the very personal details of this moment with a wider audience one day. If I did that now the result would be a ranting hurtful tell-all of the very painful events that led me to this point and I don’t want to do that. So if you’re not someone close to me or someone close to someone close to me then, at the moment, these events are none of your business. I will, however, share with you the thoughts I’ve been left with in the wake of everything.

There are certain truths we accept as fact in our lives. Things we plan, things that just are. Then seemingly overnight, sometimes in an instant, they’re gone. We wake up one morning and find the truths we accepted yesterday have vanished and have been replaced with a whole new set. Suddenly life feels strange, not like your own and you don’t really know how to handle it.

I think that’s one of the most difficult aspects of grief. Of course the loss itself hurts. The spot in you that was filled by someone or something is now empty and that is a hollow aching feeling. And even if you find things to temporarily fill that hole, even if you find little ways to cope with that pain through the day, the fact remains that your life is now changed and will never be the same as it was before. Realizing this feels like the wind being knocked out of you and it makes you feel dizzy and wonder if you will ever recognize this strange new life as your own.

I don’t know yet if or when this life I’m suddenly living will feel like my own. All that is pushing me forward at the moment, all that I know to be true about my life right now is that I am, in fact, still alive. I have no choice but to keep moving forward so I don’t miss out on a single moment of this precious, often fleeting, life. I know I must wake up every morning and continue to invest myself into getting to know these new truths so I can eventually make my peace with them.


NOTE: For more of my thoughts on dealing with heartache, read One Sunset at a Time.

One Sunset at a Time

Writing is therapeutic for me. It calms me and heals me. I’ve kept journals for as long as I can remember. The things I write in these diaries are intensely private. Sometimes these things, these rants, fears, and confessions, are hard for me to read in retrospect as the words are, many times, born from pain and reading them easily reminds me of the pain I felt when I wrote them. Other times re-reading old entries shows me how I’ve grown and I feel relieved that whatever I was going through then is over. There are often big gaps between entries in these books because I tend to write in them less when I’m happy. Writing, especially when I’m upset, helps me see things clearly; it takes a burden off me having my worries, fears, heartaches, and frustrations written down.

I went through a time early last year of intense heartache. There were not even enough pages in my journal to help ease my burden. I existed for months in a state of persistent melancholy and I cried a lot. I cried a lot because I woke up every day and my chest felt heavy and as the day went on the sadness that weighed in my heart grew more intense as it was pumped and pumped through my body. And it was just too much to keep inside me. So I cried. I cried big heavy sobs that shook my body and hurt my stomach and made my eyes swell. I cried in an attempt to dispel the sadness, to purge myself of it.

And then spring came. Spring came and I knew it was time to pick myself up, if only slowly, and find a way to keep on living. It was time to stop crying. I recently read through my journal entries from those months and found one very short entry I wrote at the start of spring. I remember the day I wrote it and I know that was the moment I realized it was time to keep on living, the moment I first knew I was going to be OK.


Journal entry written 03/06/09:
Yesterday was full of wind, like 60 mph winds, and it didn’t die down until around sunset. It was a beautiful sunset and so quiet after such a windy day; and it gave me the smallest bit of peace. I texted Dad about it and he said sometimes you just have to take life one sunset at a time.


It was around then that the idea for Flower Blog first came to mind. I decided it was time to take my life back from my grief. There were certainly more tear laden days to come in the months that followed that journal entry but starting this blog was one of the first steps in rebuilding myself. I wanted to do more with my writing than just rant in a journal, and, besides, that didn’t seem to be curing me; this was bigger pain than I’d had in the past and it required bigger writing. It was about remembering who I am and what I want for myself, something I’d forgotten to do while I was grieving, something I’d forgotten to do a long time before the relationship I was grieving had ended, something that had probably, in part, led to its demise. 

Writing for Flower Blog reminded me how much writing makes me feel alive. And, while I can’t say writing alone brought me back to life, it was the first piece of many that drew me out of my sadness. Investing time and effort into my writing reminded me how important it is to nurture all the little pieces of me I discovered that spring and in the months that followed. Before, I had invested everything into my relationship and I had let many other things, including other relationships, fall away in order to do so. When the relationship ended I invested everything into mourning it. I know I will feel heartache again one day and I know I might even completely fall apart again, but I also know I will survive again. I know the winds will calm and the sun will set and I will keep on living.