What if I die Next Friday? #2

A different perspective of living my life.

TWO

“I don’t have time.”

When someone dear dies, there is a strange silence that remains. Everyone is quiet, processing, I guess. There are no words to describe the feeling, but it certainly hurts. Everything moves in slow motion. You go back to work but cannot keep up with it at your usual speed. People give you their kind condolences and you try to smile back, hoping not to show too much grief. Work hours seem endless, and then you go back home to your memories, tons of memories, and the words in your mind “but not anymore”, and your heart tightens up and shrinks again.

The following weeks and months were harder than the days right after German’s death. In that period, I realized that I was not only grieving the loss of my brother, but I was also realizing that death could also happen to me at a young age. I had the proof right in front of my eyes. And suddenly, this sensation of “I don’t have time” hit me strongly, and my thoughts shifted towards all the things I wanted to do in my life before my time came. And there is when it started. A complete shift of mindset from what my life “was supposed to be” to what I wanted it to be. Bang! It hit me like lightning.

During the next days, I started to make a list of what was going well and what wasn’t. Then I did a deeper analysis of what I could fix (or was willing to) and what I had to change radically. In those days I had a very challenging crisis both in my job and my marriage, I had to take radical decisions in both arenas. But I couldn’t handle both changes at the same time because I was still grieving the death of my brother, and I didn’t have enough energy. I had to choose, and I started with the most important one, my personal life.

My husband also was going through a crisis at work, and obviously at home and the discussions were endless. The sadness kept growing, until I reached a point when one morning, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize myself anymore. “Who the hell are you?” I thought. I still remember that image. I had aged so much! my skin and hair were dry, there were huge bags under my eyes from the lack of sleep and crying, and there was no smile anymore. But what hit me the most was the look in my eyes, the windows of the soul they say, and my soul was clearly crying out loudly: HELP!  

“I don’t have time” I said again to myself. Death could meet me at any time as I just learned, and I needed to do something to make the best of my life until that moment arrived. I was conscious that our paths were going in different directions, it was not a matter of right or wrong, it was just the end of our trip together, and one of us had to leave the train in the next station. That was really hard…  We were separated by December that same year. I guess death rocks your life in so many ways, messages arrive to you wether you like it or not; it's what you do with those messages that will determine your next move and how you are going to continue to write your story. One thing for sure: it's always up to you.

So in 2007 I lost two of the closest people I had in my life and yet, despite the deepest sadness during the period of the Christmas holidays, I started sleeping all night long. And that was the beginning of a whole new chapter.