An Inconvenient Date

Not long ago, I spent the day with an old boyfriend.

Not in the way you think.

I don’t talk much about John “Johnny T” because it’s painful and hard to explain. I don’t know how to tell people—if it ever came up—that John and I met while I was dating someone else, we started a relationship days before his deployment, had a fast and sweeping love story in letters, and made grand plans for his military leave—which seemed to get farther and farther away—before drifting apart, then breaking up while still hoping to rekindle the spark when he came home. How do I explain that I was a dumb college kid who didn’t do well alone, and was desperately in love with a dream?

And how can I make anyone understand that even though we weren’t technically “together” anymore, a part of me died the day before my 22nd birthday in 2005 when John was killed?

A few months ago, I sat down to do a cellular mediation. Cellular meditation is, as described in Cell Level Meditation by Patricia Kay, MA and Barry Grundland, MD, a way of bringing breath to the cells in certain parts of the body to find out what they need to heal. As much as the Chiari malformation in my brain needs healing, I avoid going there because it seems like a big job. On this particular day I was feeling brave, so I dove in.

After a few minutes inside, concentrating on the base of my brain and watching things flow, I asked my cells what do you need?

I was startled when the first thing that came to mind was John.

I hadn’t thought about him in a while. Every few years I’d pull out his letters and emails and cry myself ragged remembering why I fell in love with him so easily, and why I never really let him go, but—

I never really let him go.

And there it was.

The last thing I wanted to do when I set out to meditate that day was bawl my eyes out over a pile of old letters, but that’s what the Chiari called for so that’s what I did. I poured over every crinkled page until I found myself back in my college apartment on Michigan Ave getting up early to check my email on my ex-boyfriend’s computer, and racing to the phone every time it rang just in case it was him. I was so in love yet so alone—two things that I hadn’t previously experienced together. I burned hot and strong until the letters weren’t enough and we started to slip.

Then the call. The one that sent us all back to his dad’s house so we could face the impossible together. And after that, months of grief and guilt, crying at work when no one was looking, and sitting on my deck well into winter with Taproot’s song “Calling” playing on loop until I drank myself to sleep.

Why did he have to die? He emailed me the day before it happened. I got his last letter when he was already gone. How is it possible? He just wanted to smell the fresh cut grass again. Why was that such an impossible request? Why wasn’t I there for him at the end? How can I ever say I’m sorry?

The letters were a time warp, taking me back thirteen years to the loss I never got over, the death I couldn’t comprehend. After months of tearing myself apart after his death, I finally buried it so I could live.

Eventually the anguish settled into a home at the base of my skull where it played out as physical pain too strong to ignore. One way or another, the pain we hold on to, the grief we lock away, and the sins we refuse to forgive, will beg for our attention until we have the courage to face them.

It wasn’t John, really, that I needed to face, but myself. My guilt and grief over not being enough for him while he was alive, and thinking for even a moment that he wasn’t enough for me. The worst thing I’ve ever done was betray that relationship. And even after all this time I’ve never forgiven myself for it.

After reading his letters again, I wrote him a new one of my own. By the time I was done I got the impression that thirteen years of suppressed torture was enough. No one’s perfect. And nothing I could’ve done would’ve changed the outcome. John still would’ve gone out on that mission and he still would’ve died. I can’t go back and make the last few months of his life better by being the girlfriend that a man of that caliber deserved. When he left that February he was stuck with me: crazy, moody, dramatic, flawed me. And for a while we were happy. For a while it was enough.

When I left my meditation room three hours after I entered, the pain in my head was gone. I could sit up, bend over, sneeze, and even laugh without wincing. I rolled over in bed the next morning, waited for the customary throb at the back of my neck, and felt nothing. I was Chiari Free.

This spontaneous healing happened once before in August of 2017, and lasted about two weeks. This time I was symptom-free for a week and a half. The Chiari is a dam, and it collects the energy of my past and stores it there until I’m ready to let it go. As I do, the foundation chips away and fluids flow like normal. Maybe it will always be there to remind me to keep facing the buried hurt, and in doing so I buy myself a few days or a few weeks to taste what life could be like without it.

Maybe one day I’ll have chipped away enough that the dam will break all together, finally setting me free.

Disclaimer: I feel like I should say, in case there was any doubt, that I am happily married to the stellar man I’ve been with for the past eight years. But if we don’t honor our truths and work through the pains of our past, we can’t be fully present in the lives we live now. I hope, in some way, the meditation and this post will help me be a better wife to the man who is still putting up with crazy, moody, dramatic, flawed me.