Grieving and Mourning

It has been nearly a year since she turned her last page.

I staggered through a eulogy, my niece sang a song, and the preacher was kind. Afterward, we all drove to the hillside where they lowered her into the ground next to Dad. We had all done our best. She deserved so much better. Back at the house, someone asked if I'd ever be back. I wasn't sure if it was a joke or a banishment. I still haven't cried. Not for her. Not for myself. Not for anything. And I haven't been back.

I didn't shed a tear that whole week. You don't cry at your own funeral. 

Grief comes and goes. You grieve for things decades old, then the feeling passes and life goes on.  

Mourning sticks to your clothes and tangles your hair and gums up your eyes till they barely open when the alarm goes off. Merciless fingers mold and mis-shape you into something you no longer love or even recognize. Your apartment is full of books that used to open, clothes that used to fit, and prayers that used comfort. At midnight, you rise from tortured dreams and curse as you jamb your toe against Hope's feathery remains on your way to the bathroom.

A mourner is insulated from love and isolated from life. Invitations are gratefully declined. Excuses are made. Messages ignored. 

Want a ride? Catch a movie? Meet up for a run? Need to talk? Anything?

No, thanks. He's good. Don't worry. He has no desire for death, he simply lacks hunger for life.

Lately, he has been wondering if maybe one year is enough. Maybe it's time to roll up the black veil in tissue paper and mothballs and return to life. He wonders if he has the strength or even the desire to go back to a world without his mother. What's out there? Disappointed lovers? Abandoned friends? Neglected family? Wasted possibilities. The silence of the phone that should be filled with her laughter and stories. The cruelty of a God who betrays trust and tortures the ones who love Him most, leaving the rest of us with questions He dares not answer.

If she were here, she would know what to say. She always did. Simple, honest words that were not always easy to hear, and never failed to land with love. But she is gone. The best of him is with her on that Pennsylvania hillside, next to his father. 

Grief passes like time, like life, like water flowing downstream. Mourning is the river's bed, carving banks and bottoms as the shapelessness above ebbs and crashes, pools and floods. Grief happens. Mourning transforms. The view from the shore has become home to him. He is not the sailor he once was.

More than a decent interval has passed. A year in black armbands was surely enough. She would never want to see her son tangled in the weeds, numb from the cold, lonely and content to be alone. Surely it is time to paddle back out into the channel.

But he doesn't believe in it any more. He can see other people's boats paddling along. They carry their loses and their victories. They suffer and survive. They find love and trust and faith and gather them in as they sail through sadness and loss. His own stores are empty. Love slipped overboard. Trust melted on the blazing deck. Faith frozen in the silent, starless hold.

In his darkest hours, he grieved for all his precious cargo. But every waking and sleeping moment, he mourns for it. Loss defines him as surely as sandbar and cutback define the river. He no longer believes in sailing. Not for him.

He does not wish to be known.

Wishes he could cry. Just once. For her. For all of us.

Goddammit. We miss her so.