The onslaught begins around December 29. Stores clear out the refuse of Christmas and begin to fill the shelves.
Suddenly there are red hearts everywhere you look.
Like Phil the Groundhog, you see your shadow and face six more weeks of holiday heartache. This is the premium stuff, the high test, the kind of pain where you ugly cry in your car after your grocery runs. The aisles of red, the roses, the chocolates – it’s all just too much.
Those lovely rounded hearts are a far cry from your own broken heart.
Your heart looks and feels like a sledgehammer hit it relentlessly , smashing it to sharp tiny fragments. Slivers that cut. A heart of glass, not Cinderella’s slipper.
Your Prince Charming has become Sleeping Beauty, and if only – if only – a kiss would wake him. But he sleeps forever. This fairy tale has no happy ending. You did not live happily ever after and ride off into the sunset to find another adventure. No, the story has ended.
Meanwhile you wander the ruins of your castle, your hut, and it no longer feels like home. No one to cook for, no one to care for, no one to love. No one to care for you, no one to love you. In your own little corner, in your own little chair.
You physically ache, your body cries out to be held and comforted by your person, the one person in this whole wide world who could say the right words, or say nothing – to make it better. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the saddest of them all ?
Your person is dead. You wish you were dead. You feel dead. Like the original Grimm version of the Snow White tale, where the evil queen is forced into a pair of red hot shoes and made to dance in them until she falls down dead. Yeah, that sounds about right.
Your life source has been extinguished. Your well has run dry.
The Beatles were right: Love is all you need.
Love is all you need, love is all you want.
The walking clueless, those with intact relationships, families, someone waiting for them when they get home – encourage you to try and find love again.
But you know lightening doesn’t strike twice, you have only one soulmate. You have know true love and accept no substitutes. Romeo , Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo ?
And your broken heart yearns for a connection to someone who can give you what you need.
…..someone to listen without judging
….someone to hold you and allow you to feel without trying to fix
….someone who can make you laugh while you cry
….someone who knows you and your history so you don’t have to explain it all
….someone who thinks you are beautiful with no makeup, bed head, bad breath and chicken pox.
….someone who will never ever ever betray you
….someone you can depend on to be there even in the worst of times
….someone whose heart will break into a million shattered slivers without you.
Your person. Your soulmate. Your Prince Charming.
He was here. He loved you, you loved him, and he’s gone. He didn’t eat the poison apple, but he died anyway.
No box of chocolate, no rose, no Hallmark card can make a dent in your despair.
No stranger on a dating site can even begin to fill the void.
So you remember the love, relive the moments of your life when love was the air you breathed. You are grateful for it all, even the pain, because without it you may have taken it all for granted.
A Widow's Walk 