Grief

As if I were sipping from a glass half full, I wait for the next phrase...

Grief

Ten years ago, when my daughter called, the two words she said didn’t go together.

“Angus died.”

I could see both words separate onto their own life rafts drifting atop my consciousness, avoiding connection. Like two amoebae unable to join each other. They swirled slowly, caught in a sluggish whirlpool.

“Died,” she said.

Not passed, not is gone.

She used the word that was most clear. Not even the passive, is dead, but the active form with the most inactive meaning.

“Died,” as if she had confronted her own disbelief sufficiently to be able to tell me.

In an effort to make sense of it, I think, “does she mean Angus, her father,” for whom my son was named. I experience a flashback remembering the call ten years earlier informing me the father of my children had died.

But this is now…

Slowly, the dreadful message sinks in to take its place alongside the truths that define me. “My parents are dead. My brother is dead. I have two children. Now I have one.”

As if I were sipping from a glass half full, I wait for the next phrase: “but they fixed it. We thought he was dead but there was a mistake. He died, but he’s okay this time.”

It didn’t happen. All day long and into the next, every time I hear the front door open,

I think it’s him.

“There’s been a mistake,” he would say.

“It’s not over. I’m not dead!”

“I am here.”

He believes in magic, so do I.

“Angus died,” my daughter’s voice connects.

With the energy of this realization a giant apple corer focused on my chest makes contact and carves out a hole in my heart. A hole so deep and hollow I fear I will disappear into it and slide through it into the molten center of the earth to be lost forever. A great reverberating howl of every loss, through every age going back to Eve, to every grieving parent who has lost a child in the forever history of the world, so raw it cuts a vibration into the universe. It comes through me. Using my lungs and throat, the sound erupts from my being. The atmosphere is disturbed with loss. Leaves fall from the trees, the animals run away, birds are silent.

I am broken.

My baby, my precious.

His birth astonished me;

this perfect being born of my imperfection,

his beauty

his brilliance,

his deep abiding soul.

Five years before, he had written his daughter’s name on a scrap of paper.

“It’s the first time I’ve named one of them,”

speaking of his five offspring.

Fiona Sorcha Moon,

he had written,

a poem of a name.

He loved words,

the music of them.

The way they felt in his mouth.

When he was nine and ten,

he sang with me in the car.

We improvised

as I drove

through the rural Helderberg Hills

where we lived.

His sweet, preadolescent voice rising and falling…

winding around…

dancing with mine.

“You know,” he said.

“You know when you’re singing,

and the pictures come?”

We haven’t sung in a long time.

But that bond is forever.

The loss so fierce,

it stuns me.

I could lose my way.

The carved out hollow in my heart softens.

It beckons.

How easy to give in to its siren call of despair.

Despair is familiar to me.

As a young mother cut off from the support of my family,

I came close to falling senselessly into morass.

It dragged along behind me,

holding me back until

finally threatened with permanent erosion of my wits.

I faced it down.

With all of my strength,

I pushed away from the brink

of dull depression,

of colorless half-life.

I’m familiar with the rocky climb from that pit

with knees, hands and heart cut and bleeding.

It’s not worth the letting go.

Recovery is impossibly hard.

It leaves permanent marks.

Every day I have to choose.

Every day I have to resist giving in.

Every day I have to decide to live.

Every day.

Please don’t tell me you don’t know what to say.

There is nothing to say.

Don’t tell me,

“How hard it must be.”

or you can’t imagine how it feels.

I want to add irascibly,

“It feels like hell!”

But I don’t want to return your kindness

with unfeeling words.

There is no need for you to feel this pain.

Your feeling it won’t lessen it for me.

My pain is so great

I only partially feel it myself.

If I allowed myself to feel the full bore of it,

I would lose my mind.

I am the one who doesn’t know what to say.