This grief is pure love.

‘In order to stay healthy, our nervous systems and psyches need to face challenges and to succeed in meeting those challenges. When this need is not met, or when we are challenged and cannot triumph, we end up lacking vitality and are unable to fully engage in life.’

Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

We are approaching the end of the second week since Anna phoned me to let me know that she was closing her practice. I keep going over phrases that we said to each other during that call and despite going over her words countless times in my head, I can’t hear her voice anymore, I wish I had recorded her at least once. I do remember her words though… ‘if you remember nothing else from this conversation I want you to remember this, I am not rejecting you…’ ‘…you were never too much for me…’ ‘…I am so proud of you… you gave your all, every session, week in week out…’ ‘…working with you changed me…’ ‘…I care deeply about you…’ ‘…I will never forget you.’ I can hear me quietly voicing my realisation, ‘so this is the last time I’ll ever speak to you and I’m never going to see you again?’ Crying silently as she replied yes, so she wouldn’t feel any worse than she already did. A 14 minute phone call to mark the end of two and a half years of deep attachment therapy. She told me, ‘don’t let this be the end, take this to Linda. Work on this ending with her.’

On Tuesday the 19^th of May my therapy mum died. That’s not an analogy… it’s a fact. She’s just Anna now. She’s not Anna my therapist. She doesn’t see me twice a week anymore. She doesn’t regularly read my texts, talk to me on the phone, sit writing notes about me between sessions. She will have closed her folder within which she held her case study of our work for her dissertation, she will no longer read up on ways to help support me, book herself onto courses that will deepen her knowledge. She doesn’t make her way to her office every Tuesday and Saturday and in one of the hours sit with me, look at me, study and analyse and feel with me. She will never-again leave that building holding me in mind. None of that happens anymore. My therapy mum is now just Anna. It’s only now that our work has finished that I can see so clearly how much she cared about me. That she really did value that time we spent together. I feel our connection and love so powerfully now. It feels like I’ve been torn from the soft womb of her mothering, cord severed, ripped from her arms violently, prematurely. Parts of me were brought to being in that room in front of her. Parts of me were breathed to life in that room in front of her, because of her. Because she saw me.

I didn’t just lose someone I loved. It’s not just the relationship I’ve lost. It’s the hope of healing some of these very deep wounds in the next few months or years with her. It’s the sentences started that I intended on finishing with her. All those times I said, ‘I can’t go on with this today…’ through words or dissociation and so she would hold it for me, indefinitely, until I was ready. I want to phone her up and scream into her voicemail, ‘I’m ready now! I’M READY NOW! I want to cry with you now. The dam has burst and I couldn’t stop myself even if I wanted to. I want to ask you to hold me and rock me while I howl. I want to lie with my head in your lap and have you stroke my hair like my mother never could, I know now that you’d do that for me. I want to sit cross legged on the floor holding hands with you, eyes closed breathing together. I want to tell you all the things that happened to me and have you hold me in the pain of it all. I want to tell you that I love you and hear you say it back to me. I want to tell you that the wall is no longer there Anna, there is no wall. And I’m sorry that I said I had mixed feelings about coming back to you after the first six sessions with Linda. I was always going to come back to you. I wish I’d never said that. I was hurting and I was frightened. You told me that you will be inside me forever and I am inside you. I feel it now… I fucking feel it now as I grieve losing it. I want to be given the gift of leaving when I’m ready to go.’

She invested so much in me. I can see now that she connected very deeply to my journey and I trusted her so much with it. I knew I could take anything to Anna and she would help me work through it. My personal development has been massively interrupted. I was on a train moving steadily forwards and suddenly someone switched the track without consent and I’m veering off on a route I hadn’t planned. She didn’t plan it either. I don’t even know what track her life’s hurtling down now but it’s definitely not the one she wanted. Back in March during her first bout of illness Anna said to me, ‘I’m sorry that me being ill has impacted your therapy journey,’ and I didn’t even think anything of it because I just figured we’d pick things up again when it all went back to normal.

So it’s been two weeks. I can honestly say that the pain I felt immediately after she said goodbye felt like it would kill me. I cried so much I thought I was going to be sick… and as I write those words just now I am transported back to Lucy of 1998, sitting on my bed in my room writing a poem with the first line, ‘have you ever cried so much you feel like you might throw up?’ It’s such a thick and powerful grief and I know it well. It scarred my heart as a child and I’m tracing those scars now. It threatened to kill me at the age of 14 and it threatened to kill me again 22 years on. Back then I had no one to share the pain with. I cried by myself, I cut into my skin, I took pills and drank. All in secret. Eventually I grew an impenetrable shield that no one could get in or out of… numb for decades until now. I am not numb anymore. As Linda said, ‘it is an act of respect to fully feel the grief.’ Last week I didn’t think I was going to make it out of that pit and if I’m honest I may not be out of it yet. Driving to her office hours after the call with this huge heartache pouring out of me. I genuinely thought I was probably going to kill myself by the end of the week. It was fucking dark as hell.

When I was 14 years old I did everything I could to not feel the pain and when it did creep out of me, despite being completely alone, I felt deep deep shame. Now, there is no shame. I walked across a field this afternoon where the grass has grown to my waist the past three months and as I walked I cried openly, with one hand on my chest and the other on my belly. This grief is pure love. It is all of the love I felt for her and all of the love I long to feel from her firing around inside my body and spilling over. It feels like the past two and half years she has been preparing me for this moment. Deconstructing the shame that silenced me, cracking me wide open, loving me to a place where I could finally honour the grief. Giving me something to grieve in real time that allows me to send a lifeline back in time to that 14 year old girl that I buried inside me. I’m feeling it with her, she’s no longer alone.

A very patient and wise friend who has witnessed and given time and space to my raw and unfiltered expressions of this grief each day for the past 14 days said to me today, ‘I fully believe the conditions that get presented to you, you’re going to use them to heal…’ and she brought this quote to me… “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” This feels like real and validating hope. It is the perfect way to express that there will be no silver lining because the best option will always have been that Anna could stay with me and finish our work together… but in the absence of the best option and in fact regardless of what option I’m faced with, I will find a way to heal.

This week I bought a beautiful little stuffed dog that looks like a fox. I have tucked Luna and her little family away, lovingly, for the time being. It is just too painful to see them right now. I named my little fox-pup, River. He is a symbol of my unending desire to move towards my goal. Rivers keep going. They are strong enough to wear away the land and move rocks and boulders yet gentle enough to cleanse and caress and ground us. The river can smooth a jagged stone to a shiny pebble in time and score great trenches that change the landscape forever. The river can be a calm, quiet reflector of light and it can be a deep and vast body of dark unknown wonders… whatever the river is, it moves. And so here I am, faced with these conditions that continue to bring me to my knees at points each day… but whether it be for the love of Anna or more importantly the love of myself, I’m gonna use this to help me heal.