“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

There is a lot of advice about grief. It has this fantasy about it: the idea that it makes you wiser for the pain. Is there any wisdom in pain? Probably that you do not want to feel that way again. All the advertised cures are about the end of it. Time will heal, eternity will correct all the crooked lines, and it will all make sense in the end. It is all designed to keep you walking away from pain and into some sort of hope.

Well, that is better than the alternative. Stewing will do no good. The normal face of it, the everyday nuts and bolts of feeling empty and bitter and sad is surely helped by time. You forget that you are grieving sometimes. You make jokes, you dance, and you find levity in moments away from your own consciousness. Then it hits again. There is something at the back of your mind that comes slouching forward. It reminds you that there is real loss here.

There is nothing wrong with feeling this loss. Isn’t the most enigmatic phrase about Jesus this: He wept?  Not just for his friend but at the idea of death and decay and loss and the great ravaging of the human experience by original sin. It is absurd that we die, Camus says, and we come face to face with it through grief. It cannot add up. It does not add up. It should not add up.

I am ranting. Forgive me. Early nights and early days. A little insomnia and the threat of thinking on these things too much. Yet, there is a joy. A peace. The smell of water. If grief is slouching then truth is walking confidently. I can see words again. Things matter again. I can remember him and all that jazz we had once. I can close my eyes and be on that farm again. Siblings beside me, his smile behind me and the future all forward like eternity. Joy is knocking at my door every day. I will learn to answer more.