Marvin K. Mooney will you please go now!!!

Image courtesy of Tina Phillips / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Have you ever had a hurt that went so deep and lasted so long that it left you feeling like it would never end? A hurt that made you want to the shout from the rooftop the infamous words of Dr. Seuss?

"The time has come. The time is now.

Just go. Go. Go!

I don't care how.

You can go by foot. You can go by cow.

Marvin K. Mooney will you please go now!"

- Dr. Seuss, Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now

How long does it take for a deep heartache to heal? The short answer is "as long as it takes." But if someone tells you this when you are seriously hurting it is just a platitude at best. When your heart has been broken due to death, or stomped on by someone you once cared for and trusted, finding that place of healing is often a long painful process.

Back in my early 40s (yes, I'm really that old) I suffered what I considered my first real loss. Or, more affectionately, what I like to call the beginning of "my great sadness;" to coin a phrase from Mackenzie Philips the main character in The Shack by William P. Young. I had contracted a friend to build a house and, without sharing too much, it ended badly. In the process we were sued, I lost a good friend, and it took almost 5 years to truly come to an end. I was so filled with anxiety from the start that even 4+ years later I re-played conversations in my mind, over and over again. And each time it re-played I was taken back to that very moment in time and felt the exact same painful emotions.

I had a friend at the time who said to me, "You have never really been through anything hard, but once you have it gets easier to go through the next hard thing." She could not have known what my future held. But over the next 10 years I often thought about those words. As I experienced one hardship upon another I began to see that my friend was right, hard things do get easier once you have been through a lot of them. Is it because you grow callous to bad things happening? Or that you don’t feel the pain as real as you did before? No, you still feel the depth of pain for your loss, but you understand in your deepest being that “time will some day heal this wound.”

When you are new to your loss or pain, don’t try to not feel it, or try to rush it, but simply let it take its course and perhaps find some solace in the knowledge that at the appointed time, you will find a place of true and lasting healing.

“I said GO, and GO I meant...

The time had come

...SO Marvin WENT." – Dr. Seuss