Empty

There are times when I feel empty. It happens mostly when I realize that I moved away from my closest friends, my church, my house, my son, my grandchildren, and the city that was my home for over thirty years. On some days, I feel this deep inner pain, a sense of “what have I done?” Other days, I feel relatively content in my new home in Georgia. Still other times, I feel just plain empty.

That’s the worse feeling of all . . . feeling completely empty, even without much emotion. It feels like you are a shell of a person without the rich emotions that make up the soul. That’s what the losses do. The grief steals the emotions like a grinch, The grief and the loss make the soul stop feeling, and you’re left with an inner nothingness. I don’t let myself get into that place of nothingness often.

In fact, if you ask those around me, they would say that I am coping well in my new home state. I stay busy. I write. I make art. I visit with my nearby family. I plant things. I cook gourmet meals. I pray and meditate every morning. I do all the things that make one appear to be content.

And the truth is that sometimes, most of the time, I am able to feel content. But still, there are times when I feel empty. At those times, I am comforted by these words:

Sometimes we have to give up the old and start preparing to live, for a while, empty, while we wait for the new to become illuminated in its proper time.