Heart in hand. Photo: Louise Docker.

I am not sure how to get over a broken heart. For what is a broken heart, but a deep swelling in your body that remains void where an unconditional accepting love once filled in. What do we fill this void with? Does every person carry this void around at some point in his or her life? I’ve seen folks allow this absence to awaken a destructive force instead. I’ve seen folks replace this space that once held beauty and acceptance with bitterness and depression.

It is easy to never have to own the space, look at it, and fill it in on our own with joy or creativity. It is much easier to become subservient to the space. It is even possible to be made despondent by this space and even angry at it, forcing us to resent the hole that fills our heart, spreading its sadness into the cracks and crevices of our broken beings.

As July 23^rd approaches, I can’t help but want this space filled with all my being.  For the past two years I haven’t thought about much except for this open space. I have stared it down, teased it, even tried laughing at it, yet there it stands with all its cocky insolence refusing to be repaired.  I hardly speak of this space. This dark space that lurks behind my work, my thoughts, my creative spark. Sometimes I wonder if it has become my reason for being. Sometimes I wonder if it will ever be filled or if it will remain deeply imbedded in me like a stubborn scar, that eats at the flesh without any apologies.

The only solace I have is in knowing its source. For what is a broken heart, but a deep swelling in your body that remains void where an unconditional accepting love once filled in. Before this desolate space took over, there was life and vitality that stood in the now dank desert with accepting love. Accepting love that grows both ways can never really die, for it is everlasting.  At the root of this dark space lies a very full, very colorful, extremely powerful memory that if I allow it to take over, can not only fill the dark, vast, space, but if I allow it, maybe it can take it over completely and correct it.

I have a hard time believing this is possible today.

But the hope gets me up everyday with vitality and a strength that even I never knew I could muster. As he used to say to me every day, “replace your fears with faith.” Maybe what my father meant was that on those mornings that the broken space overwhelms even my ability to breathe because it takes up so much room, he meant to say,  “Lean on your faith, lean on your memories, lean on me.”

I don’t know how to get over a broken heart, today. But I have the hope and faith my father’s untimely death will one day repair me and teach me how to fill in the blank.

What is the meaning of life?  I guess today it is repair.