death, words and connection

Death comes unbidden, like a salesman in the night marketing unwanted wares. My soul's companion and dearest friend for two-decades died this year.

At first grief fell like a torrential downpour, wet with tears. Next, it arrived in a series of emotional tsunamis leveling everything in its wake. Eventually it settled into the ebb and flow of feeling. Loss is simply there, like a familiar friend who sometimes draws close enough to hold my hand and walk with me awhile before leaving and lifting the heavy mist of sorrow.

With my sister's passing, all creativity ran dry. My verbosity and delight in words simply stopped. I gave away my paints, put my loom in storage and my notepads gathered dust.

I simply had nothing left to say.

Words, my long time companions, simply proved insufficient to this part of life's journey. They separate totality into this and that, subject and object, here and there, you and me. Words provide a conceptual framework but are incomplete by design. Silence is better suited to the paradoxical simultaneity of life and death, in all it's disguises.

Silence.

And yet words can also connect. Syllables reaching out from the individuated bias of personal experience toward the warmth of understanding in others.

A verbal thaw has begun. Words melt toward union... toward connection... toward life.

Comments

Coraggio

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grief

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angelbirdflies

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