Day Fourteen: Closure #DoMagick

Today was a day of closure for me. I spent the morning in meditation and got through some old email.  In the afternoon, however, I did something I’ve been putting off for months now. When my friend passed away last summer, she had given me a list of chores to complete for her after she was gone. This is one of those positions none of us likes to be in, but at the same time, are you really going to deny a friend their final wishes? Sure, I could have said no or just not followed through, but if I’m anything – I’m true to my word. She had given me a bunch of letters to mail long after she was gone to people she cared about. She wanted them to get a little something from her at birthdays and holidays, not because she wished them any more pain or grief, but because she wanted them to know how much she cared about them. I think she knew that her loss would be hard for them. That said, I had been sending the letters out. The one thing I’d been holding back on was the brief autobiography she’d written about her illness and what she had gone through in the end stages of cancer. She asked me to publish the book for her family after she was gone.

This, of course, required her family to be involved, since all proceeds would go directly to them. So I held off on it almost eleven months because I needed her family to have some time to grieve and I knew, when they were ready, that we’d take care of it. Well, her husband contacted me last month to ask about it. My friend and I had been passing the book back and forth for almost two years, up until two months before she passed away. I’d even gone over there to do the final transcriptions of the book when she could no longer really type with any coherency. We did what we could. After she was gone, I waited until November, then went back through the book for a final edit and format, and the book had been sitting on my computer since then. So it was ready to go. Thursday I uploaded all the files so I could access them from anywhere, and today, her husband and I met at my office to upload the files. My guess is it should be published by the end of the month. But it was time. It was time for closure. And while I still have a few more letters left to send (and I might send them all at once like I did another batch at the person’s request), I finally feel at peace and that I can find closure in the fact that I fulfilled her final wishes. What’s odd is it wasn’t like my friend and I were besties. We didn’t hang out more than once a month. We didn’t confide our deepest, darkest secrets, but the loss of her still hit me in a way that I didn’t expect. I’m the realist – the pragmatist. I don’t view death as an end, but rather as a renewal. It took me months until I finally admitted I’d been depressed over losing her. True friends are hard to come by, and she was there for me the few years I was privileged to know her. That’s a rare thing indeed. I spent a good deal of last year silently grieving (for more than just my friend, but that’s another story) even though I knew it was ridiculous for me to do so. She would have hated that. I didn’t much like it either. Sometimes, however, we don’t get to pick and choose how grief presents itself or how long it takes to start healing from a loss. The people in our lives impact us regardless how we process that with logic. I do feel that this year started on a better foot, and once I get the last of these letters mailed, perhaps I can find more healing and peace.

Getting that book uploaded felt like closure. That’s all I know.  So while I did manage to get a lot of my own stuff done today, today wasn’t about my career or my family or anything like that. It was about moving on from loss.  I finished out the day by doing a cleansing and banishing.  No tarot today either.