I woke up this morning to the busy chirping of 3 nine year old boys, talking Pokemon, talking girls, TALKING- at 6AM. I crawled out of bed and opened the door to tell them to keep the sound level down. I stumbled into the back room and my jaw dropped as I passed the window. The sunrise was extraordinary. As my eyes grew accustomed to so much beauty, I wondered how many take-your-breath-away-moments I have slept through. I savored this one alongside three oohing and awing boys and hope to wake up in time to enjoy the next one.
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
Comments