grief finale, vol. 1

I have already forgotten. In six months I have forgotten grief as if it were a country I returned home from or a word whose definition I can’t remember.

I wrote about grief because it was fascinatingly foreign to me. When my grandmother died I braced again grief, afraid to feel the depth of my loss, to be sucked in to it and never emerge. This time I grieved openly and whole heartedly. Friends and family took me in the first month when I could barely do more than stare out a window. Grief would seize me, seemingly out of nowhere, and I would break down in tears mid-sentence and grab the closest hand. My friends didn’t walk away or seek to make it right. They simply stood with me till it passed.

And, sooner than I thought, it passed. I opened to each wave of emotion as it came, let my heart break over and over again as I began a new life in a world without my friend. In an interview, a poet I never heard of shared on the death of her brother “everybody has lived through irreparable loss and you become the person who lives on. The great thing is then we contain the beloved and the beloved stays with us all the time.” There was hope. I would survive. I wouldn’t totally lose him.

I have compassion for everyone grieving, but not empathy. I understand what they must feel even though I can’t access that feeling anymore. I search, but it is no longer there. I offer what I needed - phone calls or messages, especially weeks after the death when everyone else has forgotten, swept back into their own lives and dramas. I listen. I encourage them to cry, to feel it, to let it seize them so it can also let them go. I ask them to read my essays, but I can’t feel what they feel.

You were so kind and supportive in my devastation. You read what I wrote. You commented back to me. You called. I haven’t forgotten. While I hope I won’t have to return the favor, I will do so willingly. I write this so you know it’s okay now. Someday it won’t be, then it will be okay again for you, too.

"This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –"
Emily Dickinson