Summer has officially begun, Owen left for two months to Illinois. It was a sweet goodbye, without the usual kick-in-the-gut-launch toward his other home. This time there was a shared poignancy to the leaving, we both have accepted the conditionality of our circumstance and have come to terms with the taste of disappointment. As he walked down the loading dock, older and taller than the last time, my throat cramped with the familiar vice of missing. I left the airport and promptly began a frenzy of cleaning...cupboards, closets, drawers, bedding... you name it and it is spotless. Now I sit, surrounded by shining surfaces, and cry.
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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