Saturday was spent kicking up dust at the Annual Pumkin Festival fundraiser for the Botanical Gardens. WHEW! talk about exhausting. We arrived at 10AM and left at 3PM dragging four weary boys behind us(or was it the other way around). In the intervening hours they rode rides, ate corn on a stick, all things greasy and drank gallons of lemonade. They wandered through an intricate corn maze for a half an hour before throwing caution to the wind and taking an unauthorized short cut to the exit. The youngest member of our party ogled lamas, caressed pony manes and even talked to a real witch, moonlighting as a balloon artist. We scavenged for pumpkins and looked for the three big boys in our keep. In the end we drug our selves home and admitted defeat. There is no way to outlast a child in a battle of fun, you may stay awake longer but you are inevitably far worse for the wear.
Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the
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