I Barely Took Two Days Off

On September 13, 2020, a man I had loved for fifteen years died suddenly in my arms.

It was September of 2020. Death was already everywhere. The world was living inside fear, isolation, emergency protocols, numbers on screens, and a collective nervous system that no longer knew what normal was.

And then death entered my house.

Not as an idea.
Not as a headline.
Not as something happening somewhere else.

It entered my bedroom, my body, my relationship, my sacred space, my Sunday morning.

And I barely took two days off.

Six years later, that is the sentence I keep returning to.

At the time, I wrote about death. I wrote about sudden death. I wrote about soul growth, meaning, tools, healing, and how to use even the most painful experiences to support others. All of that was sincere. Some of it was even true.

But sincerity is not the same as completion.

Meaning is not the same as integration.

And turning pain into service is not always the same as letting the body and the heart grieve.

The relationship was not simple. I could not fully tell the truth about that when he died. Maybe I did not know how. Maybe I thought honoring him meant leaving certain things out. Maybe the shock was too fresh, and all I could reach for was gratitude, love, and the spiritual understanding that helped me survive.

But six years later, I can hold more of the truth.

I had never been loved or held like that.

And I had never been ignored and dismissed like that either.

Both are true.

When we first met, he told me I was the last woman he was ever going to be with.

He was right.

But that sentence carried more than romance. It carried expectation. It carried need. It carried the gravity of a man whose life had become increasingly difficult to manage. Once his green card had expired, back taxes had accumulated, and he no longer had a driver’s license, love was expected to become a solution.

At one point, proving my love meant being willing to help him get a fake ID.

That was his answer.

Or I could go live somewhere else long enough for him to get a valid license and then come back.

Even now, writing that down, I can feel how distorted it was. How much of myself I was expected to bend around circumstances he had created and refused to properly address.

We spent more time apart than together. I resented that. Of course I did.

But the distance did not seem to trouble him the way it troubled me. He could go six weeks or more without seeing me because, in many ways, that arrangement allowed him to do exactly what he wanted. He could keep an erratic schedule, drink beer, be online, and remain mostly answerable to himself.

And still, there was love.

That is the hard part.

Not the absence of love. The presence of love inside something that also required too much self-abandonment from me.

He knew how to court me. Flowers. Gifts. Expensive restaurants. Incredible lovemaking. A kind of attention that opened something in me I had never known before. He showered me with love, and then he left.

And I waited for him to come back.

In the space between his leaving and returning, communication would break down. My resentment would build. I would feel the ache of being loved so intensely and then abandoned to the silence that followed.

Then he would return, and the cycle would begin again.

Love. Absence. Resentment. Return.

It was beautiful.

It was awful.

It was a cycle I did not yet know how to leave.

The night he died was powerful.

That part is also true.

I said things any lover, any partner, any human being would want to hear before leaving this world. I told him I loved him. I thanked him. I took responsibility for the ways I had added to the struggle between us. I let him know he was seen. I let the love move through me without holding it back.

For years, I had known there was a fullness in me he could not entirely receive. I had even told him that I could not give him the full flow of what I had because he could not handle it.

But that night, I gave it.

And then he left.

In some strange way, I was not wrong.

Of course he left.

He was always leaving.

Only this time, he left in a way that could not be repaired, negotiated with, explained, waited through, or survived by waiting for his return.

He left.

And then the authorities came.

Because his death was sudden, my home became something they called a potential crime scene. That sentence added another layer of shock to a body already trying to understand that the man I loved was gone.

There were emergency services, law enforcement, the coroner. Strangers in my house. Strangers in my sacred space. Strangers moving through my things looking for clues, looking for evidence, looking for a story.

I understand that people have jobs to do. I understand that sudden death has procedures. I understand that questions must be asked.

But being treated as if you might have had something to do with the death of someone you loved is almost impossible to describe.

It was not only grief.

It was violation.

It was shock on top of shock.

And in the surreal nature of that morning, they came out holding holy ash, salt for my neti pot, and teeth whitening gel, asking me what they were in an accusatory tone. Meanwhile, things that would have made far more sense for them to question were sitting in plain view.

That is part of what stayed with me.

They were not simply looking.

They were looking through suspicion.

And suspicion does not always see clearly. Sometimes it misses the obvious and turns the ordinary into evidence.

Suspicion had been an enormous part of his life.

Everything was a conspiracy.

It was exhausting.

Years earlier, he had told me 2012 was the end of life. It upset me deeply until I came to understand it differently than he did, and, of course, life continued. Then there was Nibiru. Then this was fake, that was fake, everything was fake. Reality itself was always under suspicion.

By 2020, the collective field was already unstable, and he was posting nonsense about food shortages and chaos. So I went to the grocery store and sent him pictures of fully stocked shelves. No empty aisles. No panic. No collapse. Just food on shelves and people buying what they needed.

He had stockpiled food for what I called the zombie apocalypse.

That was part of the relationship too.

I was not only waiting for him to come back. I was often trying to stabilize reality around him.

And then, when he died, he left in a way that created suspicion around me.

The man who saw conspiracy everywhere died in a way that made strangers enter my sacred space through the lens of suspicion.

That is a truth I could not fully name then.

After they made me leave my own house, I knelt by the front door. People wanted me to sit somewhere else. I would not. I told them this had brought me to my knees literally, and I was staying there until his body was removed.

I wanted to stand in honor of who he had been in my life.

When the stretcher passed me at the front door, the reality of it became inescapable.

He was gone.

And then I had to tell his family.

I had to find a son on Facebook because I did not have the phone number I needed. I had to explain what had happened when I did not understand it myself. I had to answer questions that had no answers. I had to become the person who carried the news of his death to people who had their own complicated histories with him.

That was another kind of loneliness.

When I later looked through his belongings, I remember thinking, I do not truly know this man.

Not because the love had not been real. Not because the years had not mattered. But because so much of his past had never been shared with me. I knew the man who loved me, left me, needed me, resisted me, returned to me. But I did not know enough about what had shaped him before me.

There were whole parts of his life I could only glimpse through objects, fragments, documents, photographs, and the strange silence around whatever had been erased or sealed off. Scientology seemed to have required some kind of erasure in him. Or maybe it gave language and structure to an erasure that had already begun.

I have felt something similar looking at photographs of my own father.

The face is familiar. The person is not fully reachable.

And maybe that is part of what made Mark so powerful in my life. I was not only loving him. I was also reaching, without fully knowing it, for something I had wanted long before I met him.

To reach the unreachable man.

To be the one.

The one who could get through. The one he finally opened to. The one whose love, loyalty, patience, and devotion would be enough to unlock the hidden rooms.

That is human.

That is karmic.

We look for what we wanted before we even knew we were looking for it. We find someone who carries the shape of the longing, and for a while, it feels like fate.

Sometimes it is fate.

Sometimes it is also repetition.

Often it is both.

And he wanted that kind of loyalty from me while keeping me in the dark about so much of his life.

He wanted devotion without equal revelation.

He wanted me to prove love by standing beside him, helping him, waiting for him, protecting him, adjusting to him — while so much of what had shaped him remained unavailable to me.

That does not make the love less real.

It makes the love more complex.

And sometimes we are not only grieving the person who died. We are grieving what we hoped our love would finally open.

There had already been death before his. My sister-in-law’s mother. A true matriarch. A funeral he attended with me, the first funeral he had ever attended and the only one he ever would. Then one of my best friends from high school died without me knowing she had been sick. Then Mark. Then my favorite uncle. Then a vibrant young woman I had known since she was a child, killed in a horrific car accident.

Death did not come once.

It came in waves.

I remember standing graveside at the funeral for the young woman and realizing they were funerals for Mark too. My body was grieving him wherever grief was allowed to gather. In churches. At visitations. At gravesides. In the presence of other people’s losses, my own loss had somewhere to go.

But I still barely stopped.

That is what I see now.

I kept moving. I kept writing. I kept working. I kept looking for the teaching. I kept asking how this could be used to help someone else.

I do not shame myself for that. That was what I knew how to do. It was how I survived. It was how I stayed connected to God and Goddess, to purpose, to some thread of meaning when the whole field had been torn open.

But I can also tell the truth now.

I was being asked to stop.

To feel what had happened.
To be not okay.
To let the body register what the spirit may have already understood.

Because part of me did feel okay. Not untouched. Not unharmed. But strangely resigned to some deeper knowing that this was the only way it could ever be.

Still, knowing is not the same as grieving.

Not slow down a little.
Not adjust the schedule.
Not keep going with better self-care.

Stop.

Feel.

Grieve.

And I did not stop.

Not really.

Death entered my house in 2020, and still, I kept going.

Years later, the instruction came through my body in a way I could not negotiate with. My hand stopped me. My wrist stopped me. The work stopped. The practice changed. The typing changed. The doing changed. The way I moved through the world changed.

This time, I could not turn the instruction into content and keep going.

I had to live it.

That does not mean Mark’s death caused my injury. That is not the truth I am telling.

The truth is more subtle than that.

Life will ask quietly before it asks loudly.

The body will whisper before it breaks.

The field will signal before the event makes the instruction undeniable.

And sometimes the thing we call strength is really the old refusal to feel the full weight of what has happened.

Six years later, I am not trying to make his death prettier. I am not trying to make the relationship simpler. I am not trying to turn pain into a teaching before the body has had a chance to complete the impact.

I am letting the truth breathe.

He loved me.

He ignored me.

He held me in ways I had never been held.

He dismissed me in ways I should never have had to endure.

He brought beauty.

He brought chaos.

He gave me a love I will never deny.

He also expected a kind of loyalty that asked too much.

And on the last night of his life, I gave him the full current of my love.

I am grateful for that.

I am also no longer willing to make that the only truth.

A clean ending is not always a soft ending.

A clean ending does not require us to sanctify what was painful.

A clean ending asks for the whole truth to finally have room.

This is what I could not write then.

This is what I can write now.