When the Connection Went Dark

I want to tell you something I don’t say in the clinical biography.

For several years, I could not reach my higher power.

Not because I stopped believing. Not because of a theological crisis or a crisis of faith in the abstract sense. But because something happened that knocked the wall back up — and behind that wall, in the silence, was a grief I wasn’t ready to enter.

Oliver

The first photograph. Oliver at the edge of the step, 2011.

In October of 2023, a cat named Oliver died.

He had come to me years before that — a homeless black cat who showed up in my yard sometime around 2011. Wary, independent, not at all sure about me. I built him shelter. I left food. I waited. I let him set the pace and the terms. Slowly, over time, he decided I could be trusted.

What I didn’t understand then — what I only came to understand years later, on a retreat floor surrounded by colored paper and post-it notes — was what I had actually been doing all those years with Oliver.

I had been parenting him the way my adolescent self had always needed to be parented. Meeting him where he was. Building shelter before asking for trust. Offering presence without demand. Giving him all the time, patience, and attentiveness that my younger self had needed and never quite received.

In caring for Oliver, I had been caring for that boy.

And when Oliver died, the boy went quiet too.

The years between

I kept working. I kept showing up for clients. I kept doing what I knew how to do — which, in some ways, made it easier not to look directly at what had happened inside me.

But joy had gone somewhere I couldn’t reach. The connection to my higher power — a relationship that had been the quiet center of my adult life since a summer afternoon on Isle Royale decades ago — had gone dark. Not with anger, not with doubt. Just silence. The kind of silence that settles in when a grief is too large to approach directly and too present to ignore.

October 2023. One panel from the storyboard.

I carried it for years.

The retreat

In early June of 2026, I went on a personal retreat. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going in to do. I knew something needed attention. I knew Oliver was part of it.

What emerged was a storyboard — an exercise I use regularly with clients, and rarely allow myself. Panel by panel, I traced my entire relationship with Oliver. From the yard in 2011 to the shelter I built to the slow earning of trust to the years of companionship to October 2023.

The first two panels of the storyboard. Oliver’s story — and underneath it, another one.

And somewhere in that process, the insight surfaced: I had reparented my adolescent self through Oliver. Given him everything that boy had needed. Met him where he was. And when Oliver died, my adolescent self — my joy, my capacity for delight, the part of me that still knew how to play — had gotten tangled in the loss. Had gone with him.

The work at the retreat was to make that separation. To grieve Oliver fully — his actual death, the actual cat, the actual relationship. And to reclaim what had been bound up in him: the joy that was mine, that had always been mine, that didn’t die with Oliver even though it had felt that way.

What came back

When the debris was finally cleared — when the grief work reached what it had been protecting — the connection returned. Not gradually. All at once. Like something that had been waiting just on the other side of the weight.

I walked out of the retreat space and into the forest, where a labyrinth wound between the trees. I walked it. And when I reached a large tree at the center, I put my hands on it and pushed with everything I had.

The tree didn’t move.

I needed to know that my higher power was still stronger than I am. The tree confirmed it. I was relieved.

The retreat grounds. June 4, 2026.

One of the things I wrote down that day: Joy lives within me and can never be taken away.

I needed to find that out again.

The portrait. Dated June 3, 2026 — the day before the tree.

I tell this story not because I think my experience is unusual. I tell it because I know it isn’t.

Grief interrupts things. It interrupts sleep, appetite, concentration, relationships. It interrupts faith. Sometimes it interrupts the connection to whatever we call our higher power for years at a time — not because the connection is broken, but because we are holding something too heavy to also hold that.

If you are in that silence, I want you to know: I have been there. Not as a case study, not as a clinical observation. As a person who carried a grief for years before I was ready to set it down.

The connection can come back. Sometimes it needs company to find its way.