Chapter 32: Grief: When Love is not Enough

These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” – and find that there is no death.”

-Eckhart Tolle

Leaving my marriage, my twenty-year relationship, my entire adult life was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It felt like four deaths: the death of the me that lived in “Us,” the death of the Dean that lived in “Us,” the death of our couple, and the death of our family as I knew it, the family our kids would be losing. And a massive part of the grief was the realization that love wasn’t enough.

I expected the grief to be hard. But I wasn’t prepared for the brutality of it. I had no idea how often grief would feel like it was consuming me whole.

I wondered, a million times, if I could have just accepted my life. If I could have tried harder to be satisfied. If I could have loved better. Loved different. Loved harder. If I could have needed less.

But then my body made something unmistakably clear. There would be no going back.

“But then my body made something unmistakably clear. There would be no going back.”

Two months after I ended the marriage, I had a mammogram that showed atypical cells in my left breast. The left breast, energetically, has more to do with the energy of Mother, while the right has more to do with the energy of Lover. I had been longing to be Lover, but in my marriage, I couldn’t seem to escape a relational dynamic that required me to mother. I felt a deep knowing that all of my unexpressed longing lived in that breast, all of my desire to break free from the narrow role I had lived in that life. Everything that I couldn’t say and couldn’t be because it was “too much” or “not nurturing” was being held in that breast, stagnating, festering.

I felt a deep certainty in my body that if I stayed in the marriage, the cells would have progressed, and I would have had to cut off my Mother breast because I had not been able to extricate myself from that dynamic. Ending my marriage was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I knew I had to do it so that the fullest expression of me could finally live.

While I trusted my decision, and also trusted that I could clear the cells*, I feared that I was wrong. That I would have to face cancer alone. That I would have to face the rest of my life alone. I had nightly crying sessions about how existentially alone each of us is in this world. I told myself that even if we have friends and loved ones, this kind of thing, the brutal things, we have to face alone. We die alone.

It sounds dark, but it just felt like truth. This was something I had to face alone. I couldn’t go find another man to help me get through it. I knew my friends were there for me, but this part I had to do on my own. I needed to face myself. I needed to let die all of the parts of me that no longer felt like me, the parts that wouldn’t walk me into the next chapters of my life. I needed to surrender.

“I needed to face myself. I needed to let die all of the parts of me that no longer felt like me, the parts that wouldn’t walk me into the next chapters of my life. I needed to surrender.”

Some nights, the terror felt overwhelming. I hadn’t been single since I was twenty-one. Would I be able to “do life” alone? And then there were the atypical cells. It was too much to process with my logical mind. The fear was too much to hold.

So I made a practice of imagining myself in the ocean, letting myself be rocked by the great mama sea. I imagined my cells dissolving into her, being washed away, absorbed into her vastness, replaced with crystal-clear drops of water.

Even though I couldn’t feel like the full version of myself in my marriage, I don’t know for sure that I wouldn’t have gone crawling back if not for my breast health. The grief was often overwhelming. Even though it hadn’t been enough, Dean had been my person for twenty years. For him to simply not be there anymore was brutal.

I missed the big things, the little things, all of it. We had a whole life together, and suddenly it was just gone. Sometimes I’d remember the feel of him, and the pain of his absence was crushing.

But I saw the atypical cells as a warning. This is the path you were on. If I had stayed on that path, I believed the cells would have progressed.

The cells were in my milk ducts, which felt like a direct expression of how much of myself I had been giving in that relationship. I was giving more than I had to give. I was depleting my own stores.

Whenever the pain of grief felt like too much to bear, I returned to what I believed at my core: that everything I wasn’t able to express in that dynamic would have found a way to express itself through my body. That staying would have made me sick.1

Upcoming: Chapter 33: Cutting the Cords

I began to pay close attention to the energy in my breasts, and I noticed that when I thought of Dean, or had to interact with him, I’d feel a tightening, sometimes even shooting pain, in my breast tissue. At first, I simply let myself be aware of it. I breathed into the sensation, almost trying to gently unravel the tension from the inside.

I felt like my body was asking for something specific. After a few months, I decided to hold a cord-cutting ceremony for myself.

Is there a way that your body has set a boundary that you weren’t able to set yourself? Has your body said no when you’ve said yes?

I’d love to hear what resonated.

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