on grief

The texture of my grief keeps changing.  At first it feels like I have swallowed a cold and bitter stone that pulses like something radioactive.  In the ensuing days it feels as though my heart and mind and senses have all been packed in cotton batting, like I'm something carefully packed into a box in preparation for a move.  This sensation deadens the contours of things, but it can’t take the pain away.  And throughout, the moments when grief is this fierce animal come scrambling and yowling out of my chest.  This grief, I keep shifting it around, trying to get ahold of it in such a way that I can carry it.  So far it's more unwieldy than heavy.  Heaviness will come.

Flying is expensive and hard to book so close to departure time. And even though it gets you to your destination faster you can’t think how you will fill the hours until the plane takes off.  Flying would feel callous in its convenience.  So you drive, and the driving - the cramped car, the crummy road-food and the tedium of the highway register as a tribute and a lamentation.     

Now and again this weird stillness descends, a state of grace like nothing has really changed.  The anticipation of seeing loved-ones, the nostalgia that hasn’t been colored yet by loss.  Strange how the body keeps functioning: my digestive system keeps working, my lungs keep inflating, the blood flows to all my fingers and toes… my body doesn’t ask why it does all these things. It doesn’t ask for permission, just keeps me alive so that I can be a vessel for this pain.

Next come the days of non-sequiturs, a room full of people drinking coffee and exchanging commonplaces interspersed with a recognition that breaks over us in waves.  He isn't coming back.  We talk about anything at all.  We crack jokes and talk politics, grow morbid, grow silent, crack jokes and talk politics. He isn't coming back.

At last, a normal day.  We wake up, we have breakfast, we leave the house and go out for lunch, we visit an art gallery, we watch a movie on DVD.  This day is exhausting.  

A week on, and every conversation is still a minefield.  We cross it so tentatively, hand in hand, and then one of us says something and detonates another of us, or all of us.

Because language is what makes things real to me, I want to tell you these things.  I want to hear you cry when I tell you these things.  I want my speaking them to make you cry.  I want to proclaim them to everyone until everyone is crying.  And then maybe, once everyone else is crying, I’ll understand why they are crying and fully admit it to myself.  Yet in crying him, we relive him, a little.