Mourning is a part of life...as with every life, there must be death. It has long been an accepted belief that for every death that you encounter, you must journey through the various stages of mourning. It is natural to feel a loss for the life that is no longer with you, to feel sad and empty. To feel an aching that is hollow and burns slow in your gut, like you've been sipping on an old scotch. Sometimes you feel an anger at the loss, an anger either at the person for leaving, at God (if you so believe) for ripping this person out of your life so unceremoniously. The anger and aching slowly starts to ebb into a soft gentle pain...like rain pattering down on the leaves. You are able to remember the good without breaking down into tears and wanting to curl up into a tiny ball on the floor. While you never fully move on from a loss, you are able to carry on. Able to patch up the hole in your heart and carry the loss with you; always remembering without harping on the past. The problem is, how do you mourn for a person, a body, when that person you're mourning is you? How do you try to carry on when you're doing so limping forward, carrying that body on your very back?
I find that I am stuck in the various stages of mourning; and it's odd to think, when I really stop and realize why it is that I am either so angry, frustrated, sad, etc. My skating was so very much so tied to my identity. "Oh that's Sara the Skater" was often said of me as I passed along, skate bag bouncing against my leg. Skating was twined into my identity as though you could put me under a microscope and see a skate wrapped around in my DNA...perhaps it is. So what do you do when that grace, that ease and flight, that freedom and soaring is replaced with burning pain, the feeling of shattered bones and hot lava, muscles tremors and a pain so intense that you are assured that you have found yourself transported to hell. All of my life I have been creative, artistic, athletic, exuberant and carefree. I now find myself crunching numbers, a mindless drone strapped to a desk, no creativity, no movement, no life....living in a tunnel, a mine just punching a clock using tiny bits of my brain, reporting to a boss that lives with a narrow tiny scope on life. These are to completely different Sara's - one is not like the other. It is very much like the HighLife magazine you would see at the doctor's office as a child that you would circle the objects that did not belong in the picture; this Sara that emerged November 1998 doesn't belong with me. She is not the Sara I know. She is not the me when I am dreaming, when I am at peace and happy. She is not the me in my minds eye.
To simply look at me in the mirror, I do look the same for the most part. I still get carded every time. I look very much the same. But I do not feel the same. And if you look closely, you will see the scars, the incision lines and some days if its a bad day, you'll see the limp. Overall, you can't see the internal processes that are going on in my body, the changes and reactions happening that are eating away at the bone, tissue, nerves and structures that support my leg - the misfires that occur deep in my brain, zing down my spinal column and with lightning shoot to my toes and back up again. It's an awful feeling but especially hard to look everyday in the mirror and see that familiar face, and miss that person. I am so close but so very far away....It is most difficult on the mornings when I wake up from a dream that I was skating in....when I am free again, jumping - my double loops and layback spins - and then I slowly wake up to find that...no, I am in fact waking up from sleep, and then that I am in fact far from what I was dreaming - and each day takes me further and further from that dream. I miss that me. I see myself, and sometimes feel myself and want to will myself to simply skate, to move, to feel the wind rushing across my face.
I guess what I want to say is, I miss me. I miss Sara. I guess maybe, I don't want to leave her for dead...I'm that person, clinging to the hope that maybe, just maybe, Sara was taken from me - but may someday return. I am not myself with all the parts of me. And I am not all of me. Just as my ankle has never felt the same - I have never felt the same- except for those dreams at night - there are glimpses when I can remember.....
