Loss, heartbreak, and creation as salvation

From childhood through my twenties and thirties, life flowed fairly smoothly in the direction I wanted, though there were hardships, difficulties, and lacks along the way.

Then in my late thirties, I faced death for the first time—the death of someone I loved deeply.
In my early forties, I experienced another major loss, and recently in my late forties, I met with another significant setback.

Looking back, the experiences that shook my life most deeply were all about the death and farewell of beings I loved profoundly.

Those beautiful and precious beings can never return now.
After they left, I remained. Unable to die, forced to live on somehow.

It seems that only through experiencing great loss and setback did I begin to look back at myself.
Who am I, and how should I live the life that remains ahead. I began asking myself these questions.
And lately I think about that question almost every day.

When I think about it, "creating" was something I did very naturally as a child.
I played with dolls every day, read comic books, and lived in my imagination.
But as I grew and lived as an adult, it became a sense I had somehow forgotten in my body.

Perhaps meeting creation again in middle age
might become one pillar supporting me
as I live out the indefinite span of life that remains.

It might become a passage
that reconciles me with the world again,
and lets me see the world a little more clearly.

Through experiencing great loss and setback, I began to have
my own "story"—one that isn't easy to confide in any particular person.

And gradually I came to know.

That every human carries their own story and lives with it.
And that they want to share that story with someone someday.

Whether it's something actually experienced, or something born in imagination,
spreading out the story unfolding in one's heart in one's own way, as fully as possible.

Through that, saving oneself,
and sometimes leaving a small echo in the heart of someone whose name we don't even know.

Something anyone human can do, and perhaps naturally ends up doing while living.
And sometimes, something one must do in order to live.