Time Served

The weather this past week has been glorious, warm, clear, with a bright blue sky turning to a blazing light the purple, red, yellow, orange colours of the autumn leaves on the deciduous trees, whose fall splendour is underlined by the rich textures of the evergreen trees bringing to mind the magnificence of the nature photography of the Berber artist Djamil Diboune.  Each day my son and I or my husband and I on the weekends, walk our fiesty Flemish Bouvier - Labrador. The uplifting weather brought to the foreground in a bittersweet way, the solitude of the walk in our neighbourhood that is empty for the most part during the day, with everyone either at work or school. I am grateful for the company of my son and husband on those walks. My family is small with my husband and son, but without them I would be completely alone, as far as family goes. On those days that I am all alone, it occurs to me that parents do not realize what they are destroying when they tear their children apart in a dysfunctional marriage. My father was too weak to stand up to my mother, and my mother played her children against each other like pins in a bowling alley, and our father was destroyed in the process, as was my youngest sister, who ended up committing suicide, by hanging herself with a lasso in the garage of my parents' house in Georgia. By the time it was all over, my other sister had succombed to a fast spreading cancer, my father succombed to the horrors of dementia, alone, frightened after my mother turned him out of his home, as she decided she did not want to take care of him, he who had treated her like a queen always, now that he was ill and vulnerable, and my only brother retreated into silence from my life. I was without a family. Through the mercy of my father's youngest sister, and a good therapist, a woman my husband had recommended, I put the pieces of my life back together, slowly, hesitantly at first, over the course of the next ten years.
On my walk the other day, it came to me that losing your family the way I did and after the dust of the trauma starts settling, is on a social and emotional level like realizing your prison term is up, and that you are getting released, so they hand you your meager belongings you had on you when you were taken to prison, and they open the big, ugly prison gate, and send you on your way. And there you are, with a soul and heart as full of lonely holes as was it a colander, and if you are lucky, there is someone on the other side of that prsion gate to take you home. I was lucky like that, I had a husband and a son, and a few trusted friends, some close by , some far away, to help me through the dark forest I found myself in. It still took ten years. To be on the other side of that chasm is a relief, like walking out of a desert, realizing you made it alive.
I consider myself fortunate that therapy revived my passion for writing and that that writing has brought me new friends, who have opened up a new world for my heart and soul. In March  2015, I published a memoir by the same title as my blog I started in 2012. In December of  2015, I published a volume of poems in French , dedicated to a longtime friend from graduate school " Les Poemes pour Driss ", followed by a second volume for him, " La Goutte d' Eau " in November 2016. " Solo Flight " and " Through the Center " are two volumes of poems in English published also on Amazon the end of 2015 and 2016. In March of this year I published a series of reflections and poems, " The Long Way Home ", and in June, July and August I put forth 3 sets of articles on the nature photography of Djamil Diboune : Entre le Sublime et le Concret, Esprit et Conscience, and Ame Brulee, folowed by a book on his photographic art, " L'Art a Bout de Souffle " in October, while in August also, I  published a series of poems and prose, " As Night Falls ", all on Amazon as e- books, with " The Long Way Home " and " L' Art a Bout de Souffle " also available as paperbacks.  My aunt Lieve encouraged me to renew contacts with three of my cousins in Belgium, which has allowed me a walk back from the past when I still had an extended family, into the promise and healing of the now, a wonderful feeling.
You cannot change the past, but you can come to terms with it. That does not mean you won't have grey days of the soul, where you will feel like a recently released prisoner with their soul in a tattered paper bag. The feeling comes and goes, but just as with any process of healing sorrow, the good days far outnumber the bad ones with time and patience; time does have a way to settle the score to the advantage of the battered soul, as long as you keep sure to notice the silver lining even on the darkest days. Light has a way of winning out in the end, and no night lasts forever. I served my time in sorrow, and even if the path back was hard and dark, the flashbacks to that darkness are rare now. I am grateful for that every day. The best part is that I find myself capable of laughing out loud again, with complete surrender to the joy of the moment, especially when I was incapable of that simple human joy for a long time. I have my joy and hope back, my purpose and dreams. Time served it seems came for me with a chance of parole. Onward and forward, up the road of life that gave me a second chance.