Sage.

A year ago yesterday, my life was suddenly blown apart with one incredibly brief sentence. Tomorrow is a year from the day my now-ex-husband walked out of our home to be with his girlfriend.

If you had asked me then to imagine what my life would look like now, I would have been completely incapable of it. At that point, I could not begin to imagine my life without my ex. My mind couldn't even process what had just happened, let alone my heart. In the beginning, each morning I woke up from a few hours of sleep to re-remember what had happened, after having forgotten while sleeping. Eventually I began to wake up remembering. It took time to accept that things weren't ever going to go back to how they were before, and I don't think I will ever fully understand what happened because it was all so dissonant to absolutely everything I had believed.


People told me I would be okay and that I would survive. I would tearfully nod to indicate agreement, but only some time later did I really come to believe it with any sense of conviction.Thankfully a determination to survive and to rebuild my life quietly trickled in and moved me forward, even if it meant crawling through the darkest parts of the journey.

Now the hardest part is behind me. I realize that I am not "as good as new"...I am not fully healed, but I wonder if that is even possible. I will never be the same as I was before, and I suspect that the wounds will always be there—after all, even Jesus still had wounds after his resurrection. Perhaps the key is to learn how to continue trusting and loving anyways. I have been quietly listening to see what I might be able to learn. In some ways it feels like this was a year of being still. Yet, somehow, now I am not in the same place I was before. I've been through hell, aller-retour.

Yesterday, I did a sage smudging of my home. I wanted to acknowledge the immensely painful memories of last July 2, while creating a space for transformation and moving forward. My good friend gave me a sage kit for my birthday last year, right after the explosion, but I wasn't quite ready to use it until recently. It was a new experience for me, so I did some research and prepared myself and my home. It turned out to be the perfect way to deal with July 2: it felt freeing, like an important step in letting go of the past and welcoming a new life.