Traveler
Anthropologists will tell you to keep your eyes peeled and your ears unplugged during your first few days in a place you’re a stranger to. It’s then you’re most open to what you see and hear.
‘Open’ doesn’t capture it, though. Strange doesn’t wait for your openness. It encounters you. The insights you have when it does—about the people you meet, expressions they share across vast boundaries of position and place, a sense of habit and time and history in the streets—will be old news in days. You may find other, deeper patterns over time, that confirm or qualify your first impressions, but they cannot match the immediateness of their predecessors.
Deep grief is both like and unlike this. You are in a new place emotionally and spiritually, yet the same place physically. Unlike traveling to another country, your everyday physical space seems not so much strange as thin, insubstantial, like a movie set of Times Square propped up by a set of behaviors, rules, and paths that people have bought into but which are backed up, apparently, by no other logic than that of keeping its citizens from seeing through it.
And you, how could you have been so unconscious before grief arrived, another blind sleeper walking through a threadbare dream?
In griefworld another logic may appear, even if it can’t be sustained:
“If only she had taken or not taken one step at that moment, if only the driver had not been distracted by a sudden flash of light through a tree that had just been pruned that morning, she would not have been hit by the car. And if such things can be so random, so wrong,” and here you must dive even deeper into your secret mind, “then perhaps they can unhappen, or in some alternative universe of the soul did not happen.
Grief is a traveler who steps into your soul. Grief turns you into grief and takes you to grief the land. Grief claws at you there, but may comfort you, too. You are as close to your loved one now as you will ever be again, alive.
I wonder if I was too hard on others in the infancy of my grief. How could they say or do the right thing when we lacked not only a shared language but a shared reality? Grief is the separating ground, where you live the fact of your divorce from the person you’ve lost by going through it again and again with the same old arguments, pleadings, and hope for reconciliation.
But what if the place of deep grief is also the place where you take up lodging between the dead and the living? What if healing is not getting over your grief but finding your balance over time, one leg on the land of the living and the other on the vast ocean of the dead?
