When Healing Comes with Loss

A Yoga Through Cancer Reflection

I’m discovering that there is a quiet truth about healing that rarely gets spoken aloud.
Sometimes you survive the storm, but not all of your relationships do.

During the months of treatment, the truth is, I couldn’t hold it all together and honestly, exhausted from caretaking everyone’s expectations, I don’t know if I really wanted to.

One friend passed away quickly, a loss that will forever cause reflection and is finally softening into sweet and beautiful memories.
And a deeply loving relationship quietly unraveled, leaving behind a sting and a strange relief.

As I’ve noted in many of my recent journaling pieces, I wasn’t always my best self during a difficult time in my life. While I tried to be thoughtful. I wasn’t always. I didn’t recognize myself in certain moments, yet it was me. The version of me that was trying to feel safe inside a body that had turned into a battleground.

I now sit in the quiet aftermath of it all. Not triumphant, nor broken. Just here. Breathing, still, steady and ok with the BBs in my mind that still rattle about sometimes, though more gently now. My hands still tingle. my head is still bald and my heartaches.

There is a different kind of heartache that comes in this season, there is a quiet sorrow of what couldn’t stay. The kind that creeps into your healing like a shadow, even as the scans come back clear. It is the tenderness of changed dynamics, empty chairs, morning conversations and late night laughter that no longer happen, people who once held your story but no longer feel safe to call.

Yoga teaches us presence. It teaches us to sit with what is. But it doesn’t promise that what is will be painless. And it certainly doesn’t promise preservation.

Heartache doesn’t only arrive when someone dies.
It also arrives in the intentional silence between text messages.
In the absence of someone who once knew how to hold space and listen intently (my dear friend Marcia held that space expertly)
Heartache sits in the space where laughter used to live.

The treatments asked everything of me.
While my body is slowly finding its way back, some relationships will not. Forever a drop into that space between the inhale and the exhale of life.
There is no blame here, only breath.
There is no villain, only human beings doing the best they could.

I no longer carry the expectation that everything lost must return.
But I do carry love. I carry memory.
And I carry the bittersweet remains of a now ghosted connection
I now have to bless from afar.

This too, is yoga.
To sit with what is.
To stay with what hurts.
To release with kindness.
To love in your own way.

“I’m learning that crisis reveals the threads in a tapestry and some are too thin, too worn, too fragile to hold under pressure”

~Leora

~ Rumi’s, The Guest House ~

Journal Prompt

Take your time with these. They are invitations, not assignments.

Who or what did I lose along the path of healing?
What did that relationship once offer me? What did I offer in return?
What do I wish I could say to them now, from a place of honesty, compassion, not regret?
What do I need from myself to move forward with grace?

Yoga Through Cancer: A Sacred Return to Self ~ A Companion Series by Leora

Reflection Entry Five: Notes from the Quiet Aftermath

All visual images for this written series were inspired by my imagination, paintings, writings, and Rumi’s Guest House. Collaborated with and designed by AI – ChatGPT.