It's the place where my friend was.
The news of his death shocked me, because we all hoped he had more time. He had cancer, but he seemed to be fighting gallantly, and then, suddenly, he was gone.
Grief doesn't ask permission.
Maybe grief's purpose is to allow that flood of loss a place where it can pool. Gather, and slow, and lose the stinging, surging momentum. Let the whitewater subside into quieter ripples.
I think I see, dimly, what I can do with it, now. There are choices:
- I can swim in the pool until the sensations become numb with use, and some ability to function re-emerges, as I wallow around in the pain. That way courts spiritual hypothermia.
- Or, I could put a barrier across the road to the pool, with a "no thoroughfare" sign across it, and leave it. Just abandon it, and avoid dealing with the pain, except that it will still be there.
- Finally, I can wade in, and start poking the bottom with the stick of memory and thought. A most painful process. I can only do it in short forays, and it's exhausting, especially at first. But in the long run, the pool may begin to drain, soaking into the ground.
From that moist ground, who knows what gardens of inspiration might grow?
Just recently, when I found out my friend was sick, I talked about grief and loss with my mother. In her eighties, she has many more shades to answer, has seen many more parts of her life slide from shared experience into solo memory. It's the accumulation that gets to you, she said, and makes you realize that you are getting old, and all the changes that go with that.
Perhaps we reach a point, someday, where the shades achieve a critical-- well, not mass, obviously-- a critical dimension. And the experience of grief, in becoming more familiar, more practiced, sharpens other senses. For what the living cannot tell us, having no words for, the dead may reveal if we listen to their silence, willingly paying the price of grief.
Each fresh loss, with its grief, attaches and chains onto the older griefs. Like working new colors and threads into a pattern--at first the unfamiliarity jars, but eventually the pattern itself picks it up, and the new elements blend in with their own dimension.
I will miss you forever, dear friend. The times we danced, the times we laughed. The advice you gave, the advice you asked. The sorrows and joys we shared. The scent of woodsmoke from a campfire, the sound of music.
Without your voice, it's not the same song.
But I'll keep singing.