My beautiful brother spent the weekend with us. How can I explain the deep bliss of family, the ease born of a lifelong of knowing and the gentle assurance of leaning into the love of a sibling. He moved away when I was eleven to live with our father in California and the tide of time took us in separate directions, now I am getting a chance to know the man he has grown into.And my boys are getting to know their uncle...and yet another wacky member of the evolving Lloyd family tree.
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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