Archive for October, 2018
Echoes of a Grieving Heart
Saturday, October 13th, 2018
Thoughts swirl after grief. None of them seem real or capture the essence of loss. Sometimes I look for words from other people to help give language to the grief that lives inside my heart. One author who captures grief brilliantly is Joan Didion. In her books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Didion writes about her experiences of grief and the echoes of aches it leaves behind. Each line feels like a deep meditation of the heart.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.
That I was only beginning the process of mourning did not occur to me. Until now, I had only been able to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death.
You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.
To my beloved dad—I miss you everyday.