being frank

Today is the one year anniversary of my beloved’s passing. One year. There isn’t a molecule in my body that has acquiesced to that reality, for the loss is as deep and pervasive now as it was on the morning of September 5, 2023, at 5:44am.

A few weeks after her passing, a dear friend of mine sent me a book to read dealing with the aspect of grief and how to make it your own. Although the intentions for the book were deeply appreciated and done with the greatest of love and concern, my sentiments on how the author pursued the subject was another matter altogether. I will spare you the title, but for me it smacked of reductionism thinly veiled as a cheerleading manual; something I did not need while in the midst of a life-altering personal tragedy.

But one of the things the author wrote that caught my attention was the need to refer to a loved one’s passing as having died – not passed. According to the author, saying that someone has passed does not convey the necessary finality; it doesn’t carry the impetus required to get past the pain and find the ability to move on. As much as I didn’t want to hear that, I realized that I needed to as part of my healing.

But the psychological connotations when considering a loved one as having passed on were not so much a delusional mechanism as they were a quandary. In the context of the phrase itself, I kept asking what did CeCe’s passing on actually mean for me? What part of my beloved did I consider to have passed on? Where was the destination to which this passing on referred? How did this passing on occur, and at what moment did it transpire? These may seem like foolish questions, yet I saw them as coherent queries wrapped in absolute logic. And for me, logic has been the first line of defense for a bereaved heart. I also had no doubt that these questions would cause my brain’s neurons to fire a string of answers that would understandably be philosophical, religious, comforting – even humorous or confounding in nature. But at this moment – on this day – none of those conundrums are on my mind. Instead, I wanted to address the subject of passing as it relates to time.

According to some physicists, time is only a reflection of change. Whereas Issac Newton believed that even if nothing happens, time continues to pass, some scientists and philosophers don’t believe that to be true. About love, it’s been generally ascribed to Einstein when he noted: Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour; sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity. Whether or not this is an actual quote is immaterial. What is important is how the passing of time is recognized as it relates to the emotions or sensitivities attached to it.

For me, three hundred and sixty-five days have passed, and the world kept spinning while the mechanics of life kept churning. In myriad places around the world, commonplace souls vied for moments of peace, recognition, or happiness, while the dregs of society pursued reprehensible plans for domination. They sent society’s collective angst into overload, as they jockeyed for control of a section of dirt on a planet that hurls unnoticed through the vastness of the cosmos.

But for a heart broken by a love lost, time stands still. That action is as immutable as any law of physics or nature. For a person in the throes of grief, it is as though life was restricted to being locked away where nothing moves forward; nothing has passed on. A mind contemplating an inescapable loss lives in a closed reality of sorts; a jar filled with fireflies that, when shaken, stirs up memories and emotions like suspended sparkles of light in a viscous ocean of disbelief. When it all settles, the landscape returns to darkness as it was. Time is measured by the moments of grief and remembrances that urge you to shake the jar one more time, hoping to see new patterns, forgotten memories, or capture a glimpse of unfettered emotion. But none of that is real; none of that can ever come to pass.

So to escape this emotional Catch-22, I realized that there was only one thing to do: To be reborn.

The concept of rebirth I’m writing about isn’t tied to a religious or philosophical viewpoint. It relates to the ability of one’s spirit (or one’s mind, if you prefer) to deny grief the right to keep the heart imprisoned in a world that cannot heal; a reality that will never see what good has transpired; only the pain, anguish, and loss.

Being reborn in a world without the one you love isn’t easy. When you spend years connected to your soulmate, that abrupt disassociation leaves you without the best parts of you; those parts that were given wings to fly when you both committed to a perfect love; an unbreakable union of two souls. When that love is stripped of its greatest joy and thrown back into the cosmic mix of energy, a rebirth initiates a search for new connections; a way to pass on what was gathered in life to help a future entity see the world from a different vantage point using the love, joy, and strength compiled by two people living within one soul.

There is closing line of an old Spanish bolero entitled Contigo Aprendí (With You, I’ve Learned). It states, Contigo aprendí que yo nací el dia en que te conocí – With you, I’ve learned that I was born the day I met you. This was a phrase I often brought up to my beloved in song or conversation. For it beautifully represented how I felt with her. All of the experiences I had had throughout my life – good, bad, or indifferent – taught me how to recognize the uniquely precious soul that inhabited one Cecilia Ciana Chejne. A soul who was beyond a perfect fit; she was the completion of a creation started decades earlier in another time and space.

So on this day, on the one year anniversary of my beloved’s passing, I am reborn. I wear a frame made of two hearts and two souls who were forged into one entity through a lifeline journeyed together. It wears a mantle of hope, strength, patience, and wisdom woven by two hearts connecting threads from long ago; echo memories of passions and beliefs produced by ancestral generations made of stardust. An amalgam that needed a universe to create it, and nothing more than a passing circumstance to coalesce it into reality. This is the new me; the repurposed us. This is the person who will forever represent that dynamic fairy tale once known as Frank & CeCe.