Conscious Departures

How About Leaving Some Surprises? October 13, 2012

As of Thursday the 11th,  it’s been 1 full year since K passed away. It’s difficult enough to understand she is gone and not returning, no less comprehend what a year means. So much has transpired in between, yet a year seems just impossible.

Over this period I’ve been observing some interesting things about the grieving process; one of those things is the interplay between memory and feeling. Sometimes a feeling will inspire the memories and sometimes the memories will inspire the feelings. The feeling seems to be the key component though. I can at times actually go back to the same feeling I had as when she was in bed and I was caregiving. Once I get to the feeling, the floodgates of memories open up. Everything from that time becomes accessible.

Quite often this year I’d find myself in search of the feeling. This would play out for me by cleaning house and going through all sorts of items such as clothing, files, books, boxes and whatever else may contain some trace of K’s life. Every now and then I would uncover some surprise; something unexpected. Invariably, whatever I found would bring me back to the feeling where I would whole heartedly indulge in the experience. There, I could spend hours sploshing around in the emotion and the memories.

A few months ago I was cleaning out my office closet and came across several discs. On these discs were about 30 short videos that my then business partner and I and created. The videos were part of a training simulator we developed for sales people. In producing the videos we used K and another friend of ours to play the role of executives in a fictitious company. I had forgotten about this disc and now, almost ten years later, there it was. And what a fantastic surprise! (more…)