Digging before the ground freezes.

"It doesn’t go away, the importance you put on one single person, the value that he had for you, the assumption that you would lie beside him forever; the hope you had for your union is so great that the loss of it doesn’t go away. To move forward you have to dig an internal grave and intentionally put that hope to rest. People will try to help you, but you must do it yourself. You bury it like a body in the earth and pray that whatever it was for you will give life to something else—like a tree—and hope that with every year that new life will become bigger, stronger, and more beautiful. But that loss doesn’t ever go away, not entirely."
-Isabel Gillies, A Year and Six Seconds: A Love Story (p. 32)

So we signed the divorce paperwork. It was the saddest thing I have ever done in my life.
After leaving the lawyer's office I went to the restroom. I closed the stall door and before I knew it I was crying so hard I vomited.

Winter is here. As I type there is a light snow falling outside. Last night I wore my tuque (toboggan, as I grew up calling them in the South), scarf and gloves (the lightweight ones, but still). I've got an appointment to get my snow tires put on the car this week. I'm behind on that task because I wasn't ready to face figuring it out on my own. I've noticed this past week that shop windows now display Christmas decorations. (Canadian Thanksgiving is in mid-October, so after Halloween, there is nothing to hold back the Christmas tide.)

And during this transition from fall to winter, I've been thinking a lot about death. The death of a relationship with all the hopes and dreams tied to it. As I saw the blast of color from the leaves around our anniversary time, I was reminded that beauty is present even in the process of dying and letting go. The tree lets go of the leaves it no longer needs in order to conserve its resources during the long winter, and I have to bury the old to make room for whatever the future night bring.

I don't know how long my winter will last, but I've decided to look at it as a clean, white duvet to cover all the seeds quietly waiting in my soul for rebirth into something bigger, stronger and more beautiful.