The sun magazine had posted an article by Cheryl Strayed called “The Love of My Life”. In this article, Cheryl talks about losing her 45-year-old mother when she was just 22 years old. Even though her mother was sick and Cheryl knew it was coming her grief over losing her mother sent her into a tailspin. Throughout the article, she talks in detail about how this grief effects every aspect of her life including that with her husband. It caused her to stray from her husband Mark and sleep with other men, and lots of them. She never once states that she does not love her husband just that there was something keeping her from being with him sexually like she had before. She did not love these guys she was sleeping with but instead seemed to be searching to fill a void that had been left when her mother had died. She speaks about the phrase moving on and how difficult it can be to try to move on. She talks about finally coming clean to her husband and the separation that it led to. When her husband starts dating again she decides to get away for a while and stay with a friend in Portland. While in Portland she yet again sleeps with a new random guy and his bad habit of using heroin becomes hers. Mark returns to be her hero once again and brings her home to his one bedroom apartment. During her stay at his apartment he cheats on the woman he is dating at the time with Cheryl, sleeping together just once. Shortly after Cheryl finds out she is pregnant however it is not Mark’s baby. He then so disgusted kicks her out of the apartment and claims to be finished with her. She finds a new job and apartment and talks about the abortion and clinic it was done in. She speaks about still clinging to the fact that her mother has died and all she wants is her but that she knows she will never return. Cheryl believed for a long time that if she could just endure being without her mother she would be rewarded by getting her mother back. She believes she is worthless and that her mother would not be proud because she had not become “The Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer”. She decides she needs to make changes and maybe starting with a walk alone would be the best way. This walk would not just be a simple walk but in fact a 1638 mile walk. Cheryl researched and planned details of this hike that would take over 4 months. The day she arrives and it set to begin her hike she takes advantage of a beautiful scenic experience. She is alone at a lake and decides to have a makeshift baptism and when emerging from the lake and getting dressed realizes she has lost her mother’s wedding ring which she had been wearing since her mother’s death. She realizes then there will be no passage or release that nit simple is a loss and what you do after it and because of it is what is truly important.
I found that I could relate to Cheryl when she wrote “All the time that I’d been thinking, I cannot continue to live, I’d also had the opposite thought, which was by far the more unbearable: that I would continue to live, and that every day for the rest of my life I would have to live without my mother. Sometimes I forgot this, like a trick of the brain, a primitive survival mechanism. Somewhere, floating on the surface of my subconscious, I believed — I still believe — that if I endured without her for one year, or five years, or ten years, or twenty, she would be given back to me; that her absence was a ruse, a darkly comic literary device, a terrible and surreal dream.”
I also loved when she explained what others do when faced with consoling or talking to someone who has suffered such a great loss. She explains it as, “they tried to talk me out of it, neutralize it, tamp it down, make it relative and therefore not so bad. We narrate our own lesser stories of loss in an attempt to demonstrate that the sufferer is not really so alone. We make grossly inexact comparisons and hope that they will do. In short, we insist on ignoring the precise nature of deep loss because there is nothing we can do to change it, and by doing so we strip it of its meaning, its weight, its own fiercely original power.
I love how she shares very intimate moments to help us as readers understand and imagine just what she is feeling and going through. She does this throughout the article when talking about the sex she is having, to the abortion clinic’s appearance and feel, and also how her mother’s death makes her feel or in her mind not feel at times.
I love how she ends this article with the lesson she in turn had learned. “Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do. It’s what I did then and there. I stood up and got into my truck and drove away from a part of my mother. The part of her that had been my lover, my wife, my first love, my true love, the love of my life.