I Lost My fiancé, Best friend, and Soul-mate

I Lost My fiancé, Best friend, and Soul-mate

Sometimes the worst bonds of confinement are the invisible ones. It is not always physical chains that keep one prisoner. The strongest force of imprisonment I have ever felt was not to another human or a concrete cell of any type, but to an emotion. One of the most powerful emotions God has given to us is Grief. Grief can entangle a human being in her suffocating web in an instant. Then she takes days, months, years, even decades to fully release her grip on the soul. Last April I began to feel the painful vise of Grief take hold of me like I never imagined.

I have been grieving for a lost relationship for well over a year. Seventeen months ago I lost my fiancé, best friend, and soul-mate. We had been dating for three years. During this time we had been through some very challenging trials. The biggest one being his decision to join the United States Marine Corp. Over the course of his last deployment (which lasted 7 months) he was involved in some very intense training and covert missions.

Upon his return he was a changed man. I no longer knew the cold, heartless, angry person who returned from the Middle East. The loving and caring man whom I desired to be my husband was nowhere to be found. His training in the Marines had stripped away all aspects of his personality. The only things left were the anger, rage and meanness that made him such an outstanding Marine to begin with. Somehow he had lost the power to turn these emotions on and off. The relationship had to be abandoned for my own safety. I experienced overwhelming feelings of sadness and loneliness. I had previously read about Grief, specifically, Elizabeth Kubler Ross and the five stages of grief associated with any type of loss. I can now tell you from experience that reading about denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance is far different from actually living through these extremely powerful emotions. I can honestly say I felt these stages full-throttle. It is much more than a process of gently gliding from one into the next. More like bouncing in between them and sometimes lingering in one feeling for an extended period of time.