“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

It has been the strangest two or three weeks of my life. You know all the details. Tragedy has not come as a gentle rain but as a raging storm and I am overwhelmed by it. I cannot say I am normal. There is no method in this particular madness.  There is no way to shut the door on all feelings and when I pick them out one by one there is nothing. I find myself unmoved by life, numb and in serious danger of letting all that is left slip by me. They say that God seems silent in the worst moments. I am silent too.

It is not that I am hiding some received wisdom or I am calmer after the event. I genuinely have nothing to say. All my thoughts are jumbled up together and amount to nothing. All my words seemed forced. I act like a character in a play about grief and I watch my own performance from the safety of indifference and only belt out the most stinging criticisms.

 This cannot be how to deal with things. In my infancy, in my first sparks of grief on earth, I had the same reaction. I cried off other tears, I felt empty off the physical loss itself but I was no closer to being in the reality of what was lost. I had nothing to say and so I made it up.

I would like to say that time makes it better or more real but that has not been my experience with it. It goes into memory and people around me refer to it and I say the prescribed lines but nothing changes. I am stuck in that dead room with no air and so silence.

At least now I can write about it. Now, I can see what is happening. This is the one in which I am involved in the finer details. I must cobble together some sort of response to it. I do not live alone anymore. The grief is expected but the silence simply will not do.