The most heartbreaking moments of our lives happen when nobody is watching.
Nobody sees us, then.
These moments are parts of the larger heartbreak.
The whispers of the loud pain.
The experiences we have because of a bigger tragedy.
I want to take you to one of mine.
So then you can take others inside one of yours.
It took place the first few weeks after my husband died.
Late at night just as I was putting my girls to bed.
One of my daughters would ask me to go and get her dad, otherwise she refused to sleep.
She kept saying I want my daddy, I want my daddy.
Go get him. Bring him back.
And of course I couldn’t get him back.
A six year old finds it hard to understand how permanent death is.
So she would fall asleep with a framed picture of him in her arms.
Slowly I would remove it from her embrace so the glass would not break in the middle of the night.
Somehow the loss of her dad was harder on her just before she would go to bed, when there was no more playing.
No more life to live for the day.
Just sleep waiting for her.
That is when I would see her grief.
And it was grief without tears. The worst kind.
The torturing kind of grief. When you can’t cry.
When grief feels like nails. Nails that can’t come out.
These moments for her were hard.
But she doesn’t remember them unless I tell her about them.
The agony of that moment has always stayed with me.
Not being able to give her back her dad was so deeply heartbreaking.
But I have just opened the door to that moment in my life and let you in.
I am no longer alone in that moment.
I gave that Christina thousands of friends helping her remove that picture frame from her daughter’s arms.
You see that moment is not in the past.
It is happening outside of time and space.
I know you too have many of your own invisible and heartbreaking moments.
When nobody was there to hold your hand.
I hope you do share them with someone in your life.
You see, pain that is not seen can never be healed. Don’t let time stop you from sharing it. It is never too late. @SecondFirsts (Click to Tweet!)
With shared heartbreak,
Christina
Christina Rasmussen is the creator and founder of The Life Reentry Institute, Second Firsts, and Star Letters, and the host of the Dear Life Podcast. Christina is on a crusade to help millions of people rebuild, reclaim, and relaunch their lives using the power of their own minds. Christina’s work has been featured on ABC News, NPR, The White House Blog, and MariaShriver.com. She is the bestselling author of Second Firsts: Live, Laugh, and Love Again, which has also been translated in Chinese and German and just released her second book Where Did You Go on expanding the mind in ways that allows co-creation with the forces of the universe. She is also writing her first work of fiction: a science fiction story about a woman on a quest to start over and begin a new life. You can find more information on her website and follow her on FB or Twitter.
Image courtesy of Hadis Safari.
