New Grief and Old Grief
Old grief should know new grief.
New grief needs old, but often doesn’t find her, for reasons he won’t understand until he’s old.
Old grief should not be wise, indulgent, or patient with the new recruit. New grief will see through it: ‘This one is a turncoat, or has forgot.’
Old grief has forgot, some things literally, some virtually. But old grief can become new at a word, a word withheld, or a song that wakes it from its sleep.
Old grief should be with and for new grief, but should neither pretend to be where new grief is nor convey with a sigh or a smile that new grief will see things differently one day, she will get better. She may, but in her time not old grief’s. This is not what she needs to hear right now.
Unless right now, it is exactly what she needs to hear.
Old grief, stay awake for signs. Your reflexes still work. Admit new grief.
New grief may dismiss old for the loss of the genius of newborn grief. She may also be patient, may pause so old grief can say, ‘Give me a moment.’ Not a break. A moment.
Old grief may tell his story, the basics, to make the link not to compare, then let new grief speak, or sit silent with her.
Old grief, let new grief witness its grief. The way it does so may go too far, be unseemly, but it only seems so because you are old.
New grief connects with old by the fact of itself. Old, forgive the creakiness of grief. Tread softly toward the new.
None of this may be right. All of it may be wrong. My grief is old, but I hear things in the middle of the night, for the first and the thousandth time.
New grief is tender, jealous of itself the way an infant is jealous of his hands, then learns they are his.
Old grief is mellow, but not always. And mellow doesn’t make it wise.
The little tomb rides the gentle waters of my dreams.
The little tomb a shard of bluestone merely can ride rough waters too.
I swim toward it drowning in my dream
as though it bore all that came to be proclaimed
of having been inside its hold
and it might hold me too.
