Good Grief 9

It's a funny business, funny peculiar, that is. It is so unpredictable. You never quite know what or how it will creep up and bite. It can creep, lurk, lunge, silently and persistently corrode, engulf, strike like a bolt out of the blue. You name it, grief comes in every conceivable size, shape, adverb and adjective. Looking at that list it may seem negative but that would be too simple an interpretation. It is invariably a complex range of feelings that can be hard to pick out and separate and the processs of trying to do so can feel difficult and futile.

I was just reading about Oliver Sacks and read a line he wrote, which said, "I would feel an intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed". It was the knockout punch between the eyes. Out for the count. There is nothing new in those words or their meaning or even the connecting of 'love and death', but sometimes I will see or read something that knocks me to the floor. Perhaps it is the simplicity or the clarity of the expression which reveals 'the bottom line'. It is not anything I do not know but it is perhaps the stark reality ...the FACT ... that, once again winds you and brings you to your knees, yet again. And there is no end to that reality, it will not end until we cease ourselves, we must live with it every day and each day we have to find a way. It is tiring, seemingly little understood, and hard work. I have heard before the expression/view of grief as 'work' and feel it is pretty apt, it is relentless and grinding, requires energy and effort (which are often in short supply), creativity, so much more, and resources as yet unknown.

This is my husband's dressing gown. I could have chucked it, as I have with most of the clothes and much else over time, when it has felt right, or not right, to do so, but have done so anyway. Is it a comfort? Not really. I think that idea of 'a comfort' is a bit of a comfortable myth, more for others than me anyway. There is little comfort anywhere. Death and loss are not comforting and hanging on to stuff for that reason can make me feel discomforted and heighten the enormity of what is lost. I think others wish for some comfort for us because there is nothing that they can offer that fits that very particular loss-shaped hole (it reminds me of the plastic post box I had when I was little and the different shaped bricks for the different shaped slots, the red round one for the round hole, the green square one, etc). Is it a 'hanging on', a reluctance to let go, sign of attachment disorder? I don't think so. It's useful for putting over the window on these very light mornings, the door looks a bit bare without it. It's just there mostly. But it is symbolic of the whole negotiation around 'stuff', another avenue which I can't be bothered to meander down in any more detail just now.