“Spirituality means awakening. Most people, even if they don’t know it, are asleep.”

– Anthony de Mello, Conscience; the dangers and opportunities of reality

On the afternoon of Thursday, September 28, 2000, I had a discussion with my husband, John, a police officer, about my habit of procrastinating on my writing.

We were at the dog park and I said, “I’m so scared I’m going to wake up in twenty years and I still haven’t finished writing a book.”

John turned to me and said, “You’re probably right about that … as long as you know it was your choice.”

Oh.

But at the time, we had been together for twelve years … that’s a long time to hear someone talk about their dream of becoming a writer, but doing very little in the way of actually writing.

After the dog park, we went home and John took a nap before going to work at 9pm. Before going to bed, I promised myself, again, that I would get up early the next morning and write an hour before going to my regular work at 7 in the morning. In those days, he was working as a civilian for the same police service as John. I was a report processor and received incident reports from officers over the phone.

But when my alarm went off at 5:00 am the next morning, I reached out and hit the snooze button. I do not want to wake up. I don’t feel like writing. I also don’t want to go back to my work. Why do I have to write police reports for a living?

Ten minutes later, the alarm went off again. I hit repeat. I do not want to get up. I can’t write today. I am too tired.

Ten minutes later, the alarm sounded; replay was activated. I am SO anxious! I do not like my job. I don’t want to go back there.

Me neither. Because during that same period of time that I hit the snooze button, John was sprawled on a warehouse dining room floor, dying of a brain injury. He had responded to a breakout and warehouse entry complaint and was looking for an intruder on the mezzanine floor when he broke through an unmarked false ceiling and fell nine feet into the dining room below. There was no guardrail in place to warn him, or anyone else, of the danger.

The complaint turned out to be a false alarm; there were no intruders in the building. My wake-up call, however, was devastatingly real.

My soul had awakened to a new reality. I was a thirty-two-year-old widow entitled to receive my husband’s salary for the rest of my life. As a future writer, this was a dream come true. As a woman in love, it was a nightmare from which I could not wake up.

Death took my soul mate; life caught my attention.

Two weeks later, I began writing what would become the book, A Widow’s Awakening. It took me 8 years, a dozen rewrites, and an ocean of tears to get it (and me) where it needed to be for publication. But I did it. And frankly, the process of writing the damn thing probably not only saved me, it showed me the way out of the pain.

John’s sudden and easily preventable death made me realize how precious life is and how quickly it can end. We may think that we have all the time in the world to do what we are here to do … but it may not be so.

Losing John almost killed me. There were days when I wished it were so. But it was not like that. In fact, his death gave me a beautiful new life, but not the one I had planned. And yet, from the moment I was first told about her fall, along with the pain, shock, and fear, there was also a powerful sense of inevitability about everything that was unfolding … as if a Little voice inside me will whisper: “And here we go.”

Maybe because:

“Your soul knows the geography of your destiny.”

– John O’Donohue, Anam Cara; A Celtic Wisdom Book

Fortunately, loss isn’t the only way to awaken the soul to the reality that our time here is finite, so we’d better make the most of our lives, but it’s certainly an effective way. Or rather, it can be.

Because at the end of the day (or a life, a relationship, a career, a dream), choosing how to move on after a loss is always a choice.