Grief’s Passport
Grief’s passport gives it leave to go anywhere, no visa, no death required. Death, jealous of grief’s freedom, does its best to keep the two linked in our minds. But that proposition doesn’t hold up to the inspection of memory or life experience.
Love or a deep friendship ends, or changes. The friend moves away, or the friendship ends over an argument that with the slightest change of wording or tone, circumstance or fate, might not have happened, but the wound goes too deep now. Love ends, or the loved one doesn’t suspect the other’s love. Grief is not a loner. It can take a stroll with longing.
My mother left her home, also the childhood home of my siblings and me, at age 97, having spent two-thirds of her life there. She never got over it. That her living situation with my sister and her husband, having her own space and the care she needed, made her more fortunate than thousands of others at the end of their lives, doesn’t disqualify her grief over her departure, or her inability to make her own breakfast anymore, and at home, in her kitchen.
There’s the loss of youth and the second-rate body you get in its place. Gratitude for the youth you had, and that you’re still here, helps.
Who can say that a grief not involving the death of a child, partner, parent, friend is unworthy of comparison with them? I have a successful colleague in London, a psychologist, who has not seen his daughter in years. It grieves him. There’s guilt too, though he seems not to be sure of what it was he did to earn it.
Near the end of George Saunders’ novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, my copy of which lies ensconced somewhere in a box among dozens of others packed for our move from Connecticut to North Carolina, there is a letter from an unmarried sister of a Civil War Union soldier. The soldier, as I recall, has the option to be posted near his sister, with whom he lived before enlisting, or his sister believes this to be so.
She asks her brother gently, tentatively, if he may be coming back. Or does he not love her anymore? This may sound like a guilt trip, but if so the fault is mine. It doesn’t read that way. I don’t know if Saunders was quoting from or editing an actual letter, or if it was fiction. Either way, it’s one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever read. It hurt reading it, I didn’t want to think about it, and yet I was grateful that I had the capacity to take it in and stay with it.
Grief happens outside death. And grief and gratitude can walk together. The latter is not where I thought I was going with this post, but it’s what I’ve come to.
