I can’t often see him, but I can hear him. Beneath his breath he makes the sounds of battle, “psshk, pow, uggh, fsssssshhh”. I imagine him, spinning with deft agility, wielding some deadly weapon, visible only to him, as he slays a bastion of invaders and nay-sayers. He is transformed, no longer Owen, but Ace, with red hair, spiked and dangerous hanging heavy over dark eyes. Once my dark haired boy of near-twelve, he is now a seasoned “ranger” carrying a plethora of weaponry and possessing the skills to use them.
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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