She lost the love of her life, was paralyzed by pain, and now she tells in a book how she overcame grief and was “reborn”

Iris met Paul when they were both 15 years old. They fell in love, got married, moved to Spain and had three children. They had the family they had dreamed of together, but at the age of 42, Paul fell ill and, after battling cancer for four months, he died on January 23, 2018.

The world that Iris Rubaja (46) had built fell apart and was immersed in pain. She could very little, she recalls, but one day she stopped in the face of that pain and “looked at it head-on,” she says. Since then, she began to go through that pain in a different way: she took him by the hand and levered to walk again and to be able to comfort his children. The process was an inner, profound and transformative journey that was reflected in “Puente. A journey from pain to love”, his first book, which tells about this transformation and invites us to walk with it the step by step of his emotions and also invites us to embrace life and resignify the death of a loved one and take on one's own.

“We all have something hurt. A duel can be a separation, leaving a job, moving countries... whenever something dies, something is born. I started writing as a relief, as a drain for my emotions. I created an Instagram account and there I found immense resonance with my followers; I created a community where my powerful, hopeful, resilient message circulated. I understood that all this deserved an order and a form. Every day I receive at least ten messages from people asking me to help walk their pain,” Iris tells Infobae excitedly.

The graduate in Advertising and Therapist in Human Biography says that it was pain that also prepared her to take on her mission: to transmit a courageous and hopeful message, especially for those who lost someone and are going through or going through a duel, something especially opportune after two years of pandemic.

The story

Iris and Paul met in the middle of adolescence during a trip with friends and the crush was instant, as if Cupid had really done his own. They soon began dating, married at age 26 and moved to Spain, where he had to travel to start a master's degree in Business Administration.

At the age of three they returned to Buenos Aires and had their three children: Teo, Manu and Sol (now 16, 12 and 7 years old, respectively). The life of the five of them was what they had planned: they were happy, united, they had plans and desires to live fully, but in October 2017, shortly after returning from a dream family vacation, Paul was diagnosed with a cancer so severe that in four months he ended his life.

“Who I am today is the result of what I chose to do with my pain. For the first year I couldn't do anything. He kept the house, did everything and I had to learn from scratch with all my resistance and fear, but understanding that it depended only on me and that I had to arm myself with courage. We need to walk the pain because we can't move forward if we don't look it in the eye. That was what helped me to go through it without denying it, because love also includes those wounds of the soul,” Iris summarizes when talking about her process of learning to live the new reality.

On that path he found a support and containment network that he still maintains. She was accompanied by her therapists, her friends and also Paul's friends. “They are family, they helped me in everything. One played an accountant, another took my children to lunch, another to the court... Paul had a very strong group of friends who are still there for us,” she says gratefully.

Feeling contained, but with an urgent need to externalize what was happening to her, Iris began to write her thoughts, first on paper in the early hours, and then created the @soymujerarcoiris profile on Instagram where, like a catharsis, she downloaded what she felt because she needed to connect with others who were going through a strong pain.

“That started to have a lot of resonance and there were those who came up because they were living the same thing,” he recalls. Soon after, his writings became more extensive texts and over time he felt the desire to tell everything in a book.

“It is a door to access many hearts. The message is genuine, organic, real, loving, conscious, it involves the reader, it is an invitation to take responsibility, shake off the dust and move on. It also invites people who are paralyzed by pain to question, with total forcefulness and love,” explains the astrologer, who trained in alternative therapies such as “Conscious Training” and “Motivational Encounters”, on which she gives seminars.

Iris says that Paul is present in her thoughts, but from joy: “Love transcends the planes and today I live it with a beautiful memory, with joy, honoring him as the father of my children, as part of my story. I don't live it in pain anymore, it hurts me that my children's father is not there because there were a lot of family scenes in which it would have been beautiful for him to be, but today I decide to be happy so that my children are happy too, because I think that being able to speak and include death makes us value life. Being able to name it painlessly at home, in my daily life or having written the book about it, to the point that there are people who know it through the book and the writings I shared, is yet another demonstration of the love that transcends everything. I think that's the best way to honor him and keep him a part from somewhere else.”

For her, her life partner, Paul was also “a teacher” who taught her with her life and with her death.

“He managed to leave that armor he had on, the one we all used to survive, because when he got sick he understood that he had to take it off. He was a great teacher to everyone because he opened his house, his heart... It was as if the walls of our house had fallen and love began to circulate, many people, abundance, gifts, accompaniment... She began to go another way and left us a lot of union”, she ends excitedly.

The book

“Bridge. A journey from pain to love” (Metropolis Libros) tells a love story through a profound story that leaves a hopeful message, a broad, loving and resilient look at life. In addition, it offers resources and emotional tools to integrate and accept pain, from one's own experience. “It calls for an adult and responsible attitude to live, to trust, to love, to move forward,” he says of the book that was presented on Monday afternoon.

“Often we don't know what to do or how to accompany when someone loses a loved one and a book like this can be a great company, a beacon. Love does not know plans and the book explains it clearly”, says the author.

Iris says goodbye with a reflection on pain and the need to process it: “Today I try to spread the story we lived a little more as a couple to tell what this process I went through was like. I am a therapist and I accompany processes of transformation, so I tell what I did with my pain so that it transcends personal history because we all hurt something, but we can all do something to our advantage. Every time we reject pain, we reject a part of us. If we get stuck, we are left with anger and resentment and that makes us victims of pain; another option is to accept it and acceptance makes us resignify love, death and life.”

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