Today I realized that this is going to take alot longer than I thought. I have been back at the desk for three weeks now and dug back into writing and editing with great relish. After three months of not working, out of my mind with grief, I was ready at last to concentrate on something. The ability to concentrate, other than on prayer, had returned at last.

But I still have some very hard mornings where, somewhere in the dark before the sun comes 'round, I awake with a comet burning through my body. All things Corey are boiling inside me. I hear myself make dark utterances like: "I don't want to live in a world that would take my daughter."

Somewhere later, as the sun crosses overhead and slips toward midday, I recover. The tears stop. I saw yesterday how much effort I put forth in striving to keep my spiritual eye trained on my daughter's passing, to view it with an esoteric lens, because the plain truth of it is too much to bear. Now, amidst the backdrop of everyday life, the inner flames come raging, without warning, destroying my ability to distance from the pain. When this happens, it is impossible to stop the fire of injustice from taking me over.

I learned this week that I have to start constructing something new inside: I must build a retaining wall that keeps me from lurching forward at others when I am in so much pain. Because at those times, my sense of injustice at losing my daughter could too easily transfer to anyone who rises up in my mind at the wrong time.

So I know now that there will be some amount of simply waiting. Waiting for more healing to come. I know I will get through this. I just could not grasp until now how hard it would be.

Three o'clock in the morning and I have dug into the medicine box for some little white pills a relative sent me in a care package: Ambien I think. She has written on the little envelope: "I split the pills in half and then a half again. Start with a small piece until you see how it works for you."

I take a quarter pill-- I have a miserable cold and have woken up with no sleep in sight. As soon as a tiny chunk slides down my throat, my head suddenly becomes too heavy for my neck and I find myself weaving as I sit here in bed. As if I have suddenly become a person growing old in a mental ward: the bobbing attempts to make comforting rhythms amidst feeling stoned-ish.

The cough drops help alot: thanks, Ed.

But the pills remind me--even as they steal my clear thoughts--that my entire life has become one enormous, busy intersection of the unreal crashing into the real.

I look on Facebook and there she is, gorgeous and shining in an impossibly teal dress, kissing her childhood friend, Patti, who just got married in the picture. There they were the first day of June. On June 3, Corey ordered clay for her new cosmetic line. On June 7 her beautiful body was in the cold morgue.

But the real-unreal juxtaposition is the very reason that I continue to say: She is not gone! She is here- but in a different form. She comes to me and to friends, letting us know where she is--and where we are with our own grief process. A visit from Corey in your dreamtime will show you exactly how far you've come and how far you have to go.

Spiritual work is not for the faint of heart. It is not for the impatient. And so I work steadfastly and wait without expectation to make myself completely available to thes lessons unfolding in the wake of my daughter's passing. Open to the spiritual quantum leap required of we who were loved by Corey. This work is for her- and it is for us. 

She tells us all in so many ways: Get with the (spiritual) program; there must be no shirkers.