I am busy with the business of ends.
Sorting, sifting, moving. Checklists and phone calls, pleads and waits.
I am packing a life, not for storage but forever.
* * *
It's Thankful Thursday, and I am not thankful for death.
And yet, this grief, so plunging and primal, feels essential. Against death, grief is strangely writhing and alive. As if to wrestle. My restless mind darts between past and present and I am wrangling death to some obscure and necessary end.
Is this what it means to mourn?
* * *
What I really want to say is that I'm afraid to stop for sadness.
It hangs in the corners of a quiet room. It elbows into doorways and songs, into glasses half-empty. Sidles into the laundry hamper and stirs in my tea, says remember this and what about me?
Now everything means something — this cup, that photo, a slip of paper tucked in a book — and yet everything means less. How do you know what to toss, what to keep? And what is life but forget and repeat?
But I do not tarry, do not rest. I fold and wash, push and heave. The check has cleared. The door is locked. The mailbox empty. Every thing has its place but my mind hops and darts back, back, back. Past is present, is now, is never more.
Nothing is final if the mind still moves.
* * *
Grief is tough to write and tougher still to read. It is also impossible to escape and imperative to tackle.
* * *
I was seasoned. I had spent years preparing. And yet, I was not prepared.
“If your parent passed after a long illness, you may have had more time to prepare, but no amount of preparation makes your grief any less significant when it hits,” grief experts say. “You may still feel stunned and disbelieving.”
Anticipatory grief is another term that rings true. But no one talks about death’s long and exhausting path. Let us acknowledge the aching frustration, not of death, but of the wearing march to the end.
Days after my father’s death, grief groups and therapy were offered. For free. What I needed — and hope for others — was (free) professional counseling in the agonizing years before death. In that grueling span in which we pressed against the challenges of a chronic, terminal illness.
* * *
It’s true that grief comes in waves, knocks you down and pulls you under, then leaves you on a silent shore, contained but shaken.
Each day the wave is less. Storm turns to mist. I count the hours, then days, between tears.
I write this now as if resolved. As if sadness has left the building. But really it’s just my mind shuffling memory, making and remaking each recollection, turning truth to want, memory to maybe.
* * *
I have forgotten the sound of my grandfather’s voice and my grandmother’s laugh is growing faint. I try to remember my mother’s hug.
Not long ago, I started a list: The Dead I Have Known.
It’s too long.
Maybe it’s a creepy thing to do. Or maybe you, too, keep a tally of names you study with love and longing, with memories you stretch to keep them fresh.
* * *
The question for me is how to live well inside our short, breakable lives.
* * *
For so long I’ve seen only endings, so I am encouraged with this suggestion:
“It isn’t wrong to grieve. In order to move forward, it’s necessary. But, finally, it will again be possible to look toward to the future with hope and excitement. Life has been difficult, almost unbearably so, but you can sense something beautiful on the horizon.”
Yes, it’s a sappy vision. But, I’ll take it, and hold tight to gratitude, too.
* * *
It's Thankful Thursday.
Because joy expands and contracts in direct relation to our sense of gratitude, let’s pause to appreciate the good.
What are you thankful for today?