This act of grieving is a physical one. Grieving has nothing to do with emotions, which are the soft expressions of the heart. Grieving is felt by the hands and the arms. There is pain in grieving, and it extends to the body, down to the feet, which carry the burden of a sadness and aloneness beyond measure.
In grief, you are one with the horizon. There is no sky, or sun or moon. There is the vast horizon a lesson in emptiness, which is the lesson of grief. You can look up at night and catch the stars. Stare at them, for they can teach you how to weep, which is a product of grieving.
Grieving is that quiet pause before a beautiful song is about to end, and there is a sharp stab in your stomach as you try to let the song or the music go on. But you know the sound has to stop. The composer has caused that his song shall end with a particular word or note. You can play the song again but, before you can do that, you know the music has to be terminated. In that terminus, you can locate the power of grieving—that sense of the world, of a particular world that has seen its end.
Grieving is of the body unto itself. Solitude comes as a gift when one grieves and, there in that solace, the body is alone. You can hold a kin’s hand, but you stay alone in grief. Grieving does not allow company even if that person is also grieving. Grieving is selfish.
In grief, you can slice sorrow in a space. The love that you cannot offer now is both flesh and wound, both contract and vow. Grief is perfectly real. You can write it with your quivering fingers in the air, and the phrases of caring and unfulfilled promises rise once more. You should touch those words lest they haunt you. Thus, you grieve so they will not become scars in your soul that, by now, have turned ito a mass of finite infinity, a vessel that is limited and, yet, can endure all imaginable condemnations.
There is no eternity when one grieves. Everything becomes temporal. The chair has no meaning beyond the fact that we sit on it. You cannot conjure images of the Beloved on that chair or at the dining table. Grief can cause the universe to collapse into the fold of one’s hand. You clench that hand, and grief is a sturdy, thick crown assuring sweet bleeding.
There is no deeper grief or a shallow one. Griefs can belong to no one and, yet, when you grieve, you own such grief.
All griefs are about things that are not there anymore, of persons who are gone forever. One does not grieve for things that can appear once more, or persons who can be visible again. Grieving has no opposite. Not joy in the recovery of things or relief at the sight of a loved one.
If there is a consolation in grief, it is that when you grieve, you can summon angels, all good angels to be with you. Angels do not know how to grieve. They are the perfect companions as you die over and over and live again, as one dear poet puts it, with all the loves you can recall.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano