The Love of Grief
How can you love grief, not hate it?
Because it brings you as close as you may ever be again to the one who is gone.
The baseball glove. How long should you hold onto it? The shoes. The ugly sweater.
Just part of the process of letting go, you might say.
Shopping for five instead of four then catching yourself mentally in the cereal aisle. ‘Oh yes, he’s gone.’ The extra chair at the table that you take away pretending you miscounted, not to remind others of what you have no need to remind them.
‘Habit’ and ‘persistence of memory’ may be involved here, but only as vehicles of grief, not the essence of it.
Brooding, over time, ‘Is my grief pure, or partly guilt for going on?’ This brooding, though, would you trade it for never again having such a thought, when the one you love is present in it?
A strange love, a sharp pain that sticks deep, yet a tap on the shoulder may come with it.
The forms and even some of the feelings of grief may be different in other cultures. Are grief in America and grief in Zambia, where my daughter was in Peace Corps, the same? At bottom, maybe. In their ways, probably not.
There is another aspect of grief, though, that may be independent of culture or country, and give the grieving another reason to cover their ears against Lifeworld’s call to return to the fold. It’s called ‘ineffability, that which cannot be spoken because there are no words for it.
A friend told me that when her father was dying, he came out of a coma and told her he had been in a place where everything shimmered, and he was surrounded by love.
For her father to hold back from speaking would have been to honor the ineffability of what he had experienced, fine as his words are. To speak of it was to risk dulling the shimmer, but in the name of love. Now, his daughter could decide whether, or when, to shatter the ineffability of her experience of her father’s gift, and tell others.
I write about the love of grief thinking mostly of those who are not grieving themselves, to try to convey why the bereaved may be slow to answer Lifeworld’s call.
Covid, Israel-Gaza, the fire consuming Mother Earth, grief for a country splitting before our eyes may be awakening us to a greater understanding of grief. If so, then a post like this is merely an instance of that awakening, not a counter-call.
That would be all right, too.
The next two posts will arrive on Wednesday, December 27 and Wednesday, January, then go back to Mondays. Happy holidays to you.
