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THE ELUSIVE GIFT OF TRAGEDY
by
Regina Rose Murphy

Chapter Fifteen
The Shock Is Over; the Grief Begins
The Meaning of the Tear in the Tapestry

What do you do the day after you bury your child or spouse, get diagnosed with cancer, lose your job, find out your wife is cheating on you, accused of a crime you did not commit, get raped, lose a limb, get drafted into a war you don’t want to fight, lose your ability to take care of your family, suddenly realize you’re addicted to painkillers, told that your child has autism or never arrived at school, have a stroke or a heart attack, are put into a long term care facility when your family can no longer keep you around, get into a car accident after you had two glasses of wine, or realize you are losing your memory little-by-little each day, to name a few.

Each day you wake up, you feel as if you’re in the middle of a swimming pool. You’re out of your depth, can’t swim and can barely see the sides. You panic and realize you’re alone. It doesn’t matter how many hands are trying to reach out and help you. These are the things you go through alone when you wake up in the morning and realize your trauma was not a dream. It was real. Your life has changed forever. You wonder if the pain of waking up will ever lessen. You wonder why you even wake up if it is true. It would be easier to never wake up again, but you do wake up again and again, only to realize you now must learn to swim to the edge of that pool or you’ll sink into a depression from which you will never recover.

Each day, you decide if you’ll learn to swim or just allow yourself to sink to the bottom and die. Days come and go, and yet you still wake up in the center of that pool and must decide again to try to swim or just give up? You ask yourself, what matters? What really matters? The answer to that question is going to determine if you swim or sink.

Something has to matter. If you cannot find something to matter, you may not find the determination to learn to swim again. The other option is to stay alive only out of the fear of dying, but that is not living. This is like the movie The Night of the Living Dead. You never engage again in life. You simply go through the mechanics of functioning as a human being. Other people do not notice that you’re not really there anymore, because you can “act out life” very well. The true essence of you begins to disappear behind the walls of a fortress within, and you don’t care.

If you’re lucky, after any of these things, there will be people who are relying on you for something. It could be family, relatives or just friends. If you are needed, you will have a better chance to recover. If you have children who need you, or people at work who are counting on you, or a spouse depending on you, or even a dog to care for, this can help. The only real difference will be if you can find a dream for your life that still pulls at your heartstrings. A dream that can light the pilot light again in your heart.

These are the things that can get you to learn to swim through the first year of a life-changing event. Nothing is easy about the adjustment period to a life that will never be the same. The most important thing for me was to be and feel productive. I knew I could still make a difference. The biggest difference I could make in this human form was to radiate thoughts of love. Even if we cannot speak or move a muscle, we can make a difference by radiating thoughts of love. Many souls who come in and seemingly have nothing to live for are here to emit love just by being where they are. They are human love amplifiers.

We have much to learn from these highly vibrating beings of light. If your whole world falls apart and you just begin to think loving thoughts, your world will be a brighter place. It is possible to train your mind to repeat a highly vibrating thought hundreds of times per day to lift you up. Something as simple as “Glory to God in the Highest,” or, “My Gaze is only on God,” or the phase, “I Love You, Jesus.”

This is not to be confused with stuffing emotions and living in denial. I read that many of the prisoners in Nazi Germany would raise their hands and bless the tormentors in the death camps. They figured out that this blessing they sent out lifted their own pain and suffering. The intention was only to send love to their executioners but they found the blessing ran through them as an added gift.

It is only about choice of focus. No one can take away the power to focus our thoughts. It is always better to process the nagging thoughts so you can be sure the negative thoughts are not festering in your physical body. Hurt feelings, thoughts of self-judgment and blame are sometimes the most difficult to process and it takes determination. Most of us would throw out the sour milk in the refrigerator if we noticed it. The concept is the same: Being vigilant of repetitive negative thoughts and taking full responsibility for them requires courage.

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