Book like this, with lists of 'grief tasks', tempt me to look for signs of recovery, to check off the items on the list that I have 'done'. Accepted Jen's death? Check. There's some value in trying to sketch a rough outline of what people typically experience. I worry when it tends towards the prescriptive. As I've written before, I'm not sure that grief is ever over, since it's about love. Any important trauma will change the course of one's life, so that one can never truly recover 'the life you might have led'.
A friend lent me a collection of poems by Vassar Miller. The following poem seemed to sum up my feelings about recovery.
Thorn in the Flesh
Light comes againbut sometimesfalls at crooked angles.
Now there is song,but sometimesthe silence conducts it.
My days are fullbut sometimesonly of your absence.
I have been healed,but sometimesstill the whole heart hobbles.
Posts
Thankyou for the blog (in its entirety), this post (especially the comment about grief that is like love), and the discovery of Vassar Miller, whose life, or what I've read of it on Wikepedia, astonishes me.
ReplyDeleteHere's one of her unpublished Sonnets (have you come across Denise Levertov?)
Christ Dies
Christ droops upon the Cross, pale lily wilted brown,
Maker unmade, Creator uncreated,
His triumph now remaining unrelated,
Stitcher come unstitched, by His hand unsewn
Doer of all deeds by Himself undone,
A void now seems the one that we awaited,
His course once carefully set down unstated,
For God, my God! is by His world undone.
Yet faith remains itself, the unseen becomes seen
To eyes that do not swerve from hope beyond all hope
That flesh is more than flesh, that dust is more than dust:
The less I can believe, the more I trust.
- Vassar Miller
Thanks for the poem - not one that I'd read, although I got through about 3/4 of her collected poems. Levertov I've heard of, although never explored her work beyond something in anthologies.
ReplyDeleteIt's rare for me to get blog comments apart from one faithful friend - I'm reminded of the phrase about 'dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon, and waiting for an echo'. Blogging often seems like a solitary reflection, into which others sometimes peer as well.
(chuckle) Blogosphere is a strange world which I am still trying to figure out. There's a strange vicariousness about it, though you presume that whoever is posting is aware that all can be read ... by all. Solitary writing indeed, but different to say, a good ol' fashioned diary, and, at a click of a button your reader can "follow" a blog and keep updated.
ReplyDeleteI daresay there are many who read and pray over things posted on this blog, only they are not so presumptuous as I! A stranger blundering in.
I like that image with the rose petal falling down the abyss, but perhaps blogging is a bit more like playing 'cello in what feels like a soundproof practice room. Most of the time you only get echoes back, but sometimes someone sticks a head in the door when you least expect it and say "Boo."
"Aarh!" you reply (as only appropriate).
They look apologetic. And after a moment they duck their head and say: that tune's familiar, is it Bach? Or, thanks for the Beethoven, glad someone else loves it too. Or, keep working on that vibrato, it's a tough passage, but you'll get there...
Only I don't suppose you can get echoes in a soundproof room. Oops. Fail in elementary physics.
ReplyDeleteTwo ideas interlinking here: that the grief thing is both shared and also incredibly isolating - the Beloved is gone and we are left with deeply treasured memories that, as time passes, will be shared with fewer and few people as they move away (physically or emotionally) and their life path takes different turns. In that soundproof room there is no way to hear the words of comfort from distant friends who try to reach us through the grief - to reassure us that although they have no idea what we are suffering, the can see that we do...and somehow, trying to share the stories/memories of experiences only made with teh Beloved makes the grief even foggier when the intention was to reassure us.
ReplyDeleteI no longer use the idea of a journey helpful, not only because my grief, particularly the single parent aspect of it, is mostly circular in its pained repetitiveness, but because there are different aspects of the same memory that I ache for as the years pass.
Yet my little 'widows club' of five widows, all much more experienced than me, do claim to see that I have progressed and from their lips these words do comfort and reassure me that I am having more days of light, of joy, of alone but not lonely....