Closer to Grief

When I look back on this year, one of the themes is loss. Not for me so much (well, not in the way I’m talking about here), but for a number of my friends. I need two hands to count how many—all of whom are in my own general age cohort—have lost fathers or mothers this past year, or probably will within weeks or months.

In some cases it’s after long illnesses and slow declines. In other cases it’s something sudden and unexpected—an aneurysm, a heart attack, the onset of a rare and aggressive disease.

My own father is now living with stage IV cancer (relapsed colon cancer, metastasized to the lungs) and while he’s currently doing very well, and the cancer doesn’t seem to be advancing quickly—he’s still active; you wouldn’t  know he was sick if you saw him—we have no idea how long that will be the case.

I don’t know that there’s any way to prepare yourself in advance for grief—to somehow steel yourself so that it will hurt less. I’ve been fortunate never to have lost anyone very close to me, with the exception of my paternal grandmother, the only one of my four grandparents I considered myself close to. I was certainly sad when she died, but it wasn’t the kind of sadness I felt in my bones—the kind I felt, for example, when Clio was first diagnosed with cancer. My grandmother’s death didn’t weigh on me or fundamentally alter my sense of being in the world the way I suspect losing a parent does.

Lately, I find myself stepping back now and then to feel grateful for the fact that my parents and my in-laws are all still here, all still very much active and present, physically and mentally. It weighs increasingly on my mind that there will be a time when they won’t be here, and I’m dreading it.  There are a lot of inevitabilities I dread. But a person can’t walk around dread-filled all the time, right?

I’m not quite sure what my point is (do I ever?).  So I’ll just close this moody little post by saying that I’m sending my love to my parents and in-laws and everyone else I feel blessed to have in my life. I’m sending it to my friends out there who have lost a parent recently or will soon.

I’m sending it to Lindsey Mead—whose blog is wonderful—who lost her dad unexpectedly not too long ago, and who a while back posted this poem about grief, by Mary Oliver, which I find so stirring.  Here it is.

Heavy

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poets said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it—
books, bricks, grief—
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled—
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

— Mary Oliver

Take good care out there, people.