Owen has an alter ego. He first told me about him two years ago in a confidential interview. His name is Ace. He has brilliantly scarlet hair. He wears a long fitted black jacket, boots an elfin bow and a broad sword. He is outgoing and graceful, athletic and fearless. Owen told me that whenever he spins circles in the back yard he is being Ace in a richly imaginative world, complete with monsters to battle and epic challenges to overcome. Owen has been wanting vibrant red hair for a year now and I have always said no. In order to dye his gorgeous locks, one first needs to remove that rich walnut hue with bleach and then lay some red color on top of that. It doesn't last long and it's pricey. Owen finally said, "Mom, I feel like I need to be more like the me inside of me. I want to dye my hair." Well who am I to stand against self expression and so yesterday, while at the Italian Festival in Belmar we wandered into the Paul Mitchell School and Owen and Ace united in expression.
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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