Good Grief 141

part 3

Fragments. Already I am trying to piece together fragments of just one day - just ordinary Friday and realising I am trying to piece together a universe and create coherence. Impossible.
Remember? Starting with Cummings 'love is more thicker than forget'. It was all too perfect to write more and yet there was so much more and there is so much more to say. But there was a purity of time, a purity of place, a profundity of silence where only Cummings would do. And you read it out on our wedding day.

But there was all that went before it .... the need to go there that had been tugging away since being cut off. You are both there in part and I felt you had been abandoned and might think I was neglecting you but couldn't get there. I had always thought that because there are no graves this would not be an issue. There is nothing to 'tend' as such. But this made me realise that there was. There is. Very much. And it became a pilgrimage. Not exactly a Santiago de Compostela job but a local, and a very individual and personal one.
I took you with me.
We skimmed stones, it wasn't memory as such, it was 'now'.
Going back to what I have said before about memory .... it is not this horrible anodyne thing that people speak of  ... 'at least you have all the lovely memories'. NO! Those sorts of things are dead. Dead things. Crystallised ... Yuk ... they make me rage and want to throw up.
But this, this ... this stone skimming is different ... it is more of the Auden ... 'What will survive of us is love' ... it is a living memory, it is now. It is lived and loved. And lost again. And again. It is so strange how full, not empty, loss can be. An indescribably full emptiness. If that isn't a complete impossibility. No wonder I resort to Cummings ... he gets it.

And then there's more.
I am still pondering the day before The Pilgrimage.
Perhaps it will join together but for now the disparate dots are - the end of the day, the conversations, the reaction, the trying to understand the reaction, the despair felt, trying to understand the despair felt, the anger, or 'crossness', the perceptions, misperceptions, the communication, miscommunication, the loneliness of the moment, the alienation, the separation, the sadness.
And, back to the whole business of what it is we hold on to.
Do I hold on to grief? Does it hold on to me? How that is perceived. It is almost always seen negatively. But I feel that it actually serves a purpose and in our quickness to label it as 'anger', 'hanging on to ...', a keeping something as 'mine' .... even when it is loss that I hold on to ....
All these can feel like dismissing, labelling, rationalising, formulating etc but miss the point that perhaps, just perhaps, it serves a function.
I am aware that it is what got me going. It is what motivated me to my Pilgrimage. It is what was needed just then. It somehow knew.
It doesn't necessarily make the world, me, anything better for it ... but it was what was required of that moment. Perhaps we strive to serve the moment in the only way we can.