Let It Be . . . Me
I know you’ve seen the video, everyone has. It’s been emailed and remailed, Facebooked and Twittered, blogged and Gathered, clogging cyberspace with the message: Let It Be. At first I thought that perhaps this was the answer to my confusion over the death of my mate of thirty-four years. Just go on with my life and let it be. Forget my grief. Forget the pain of losing him. Forget trying to make sense of it all. Just . . . let it be.
My second thought as I continued watching this very looooong and repetitive song (Sheesh! What was Paul McCartney thinking when he wrote it? Not much, apparently) was how my mate would have enjoyed seeing all those faces as they are today. We have so many of them in his movie collection, and they are always that age, the one they’d reached when they made that particular movie (such as a much younger Sherilyn Fenn in The Don’s Analyst or a very young and fit Steve Guttenberg in Surrender).
My third thought was let what be what? And that’s where the thoughts stalled — in a semantics word jam.
I finished watching the video, thinking nothing, just watching the parade of faces, but now I’m wondering if Let it Be is really a philosophy I want to embrace. It seems too accepting of life’s vagaries and not enough of . . . well, embracing.
The whole purpose of going through grief is to process the pain and the loss, to mend your shattered life and heart so that one day you can embrace life in its entirety once again. I haven’t dealt with all these months of tears, anger, frustration, emptiness, loneliness, pain, just to spend the rest of my life letting it be. I want to let it be me – the one who’s strong enough not to have to simply let it be.
About Pat
When the traditional publishers stopped publishing Pat Bertram’s favorite type of book — character and story driven novels that can’t easily be slotted into a genre — she decided to write her own. Daughter Am I is Bertram’s third novel. She is also the author...
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Sounds as if you're saying ...
... you're not into an airy-fairy dismissal of the grief process you lived through after losing your mate.
You have handled the worst of the heartache, and are feeling as if you are coming out on the other side of it. You have gained experience and the knowledge you can handle difficult things. You are not afraid to revisit your memories, and revel in the joy that you experienced when he was alive. That, I think, would feel like you were honoring him.
Did I get it?
Poor old Paul McCartney probably understands it better now than when he wrote it.
Barb
Barbara Pottie Holmes
Barbara, yes! Exactly. No airy-fairy dismissal of what happened to me and him. Though I'm not yet to the point where I can take joy in memories of him, I am willing to embrace what comes until then.
Embrace it
Pat, I'm not sure how you just let it be either, especially someone you have shared so many years of untold life's little and big experiences. I can remember being told to "move on" or "let it go" after experiencing my first close loss. My thoughts were- 'really! are you serious? even if you could just let it go why would you?' It seemed to me that embracing that deep emotional bond that tied you together so tightly would all of a sudden be cheated if you simply just let it be. This kind of grief exists almost like a person itself. You have to pay attention to it and hopefully, eventually grow up with it making you stronger and better for it. What more could the missed love one ask for?
Ron McElroy
Ron, great response, even if we could let go, why would we? People accuse me of dwelling on my grief, yet it's a great priviledge to try to make sense of our lives, his death, my grief. From that will come a greater understanding, and perhaps a bit of wisdom, which will be so much better than the simplistic "let it be."