excerpts from Companion Through The Darkness

The Agony of Grief

What is there to say about grief?

Grief is a tidal way that overtakes you, smashes down upon you with unimaginable force, sweeps you up into its darkness, where you tumble and crash against unidentifiable surfaces, only to be thrown out on an  unknown beach, bruised, reshaped.

Grief means not being able to read more than two sentences at a time. It is walking into rooms with intention that suddenly vanishes.

Grief is three-o’clock-in-the-morning sweats that won’t stop. It is dreadful Sundays, and Mondays that are no better. It makes you look for a face in a crowd, knowing full-well the face we want cannot be found in that crown.

Grief is utter aloneness that razes the rational mind and makes room for the phantasmagoric. It makes you get up and leave in the middle of a meeting, without saying a word.

Grief makes what others think of you moot. It shears away the masks of normal life and forces brutal honesty out of your mouth before propriety can stop you. It shoves away friends, scares away so-called friends, and rewrites your address book for you.

Grief makes you laugh at people who cry over spilled milk, right to their faces. It tells the world that you are untouchable at the very moment when touch is the only contact that might reach you. It makes lepers out of up-standing citizens.

Grief discriminates against no one. It kills. Maims. And cripples. It is the ashes from which the phoenix rises, and the mettle of rebirth. It returns life to the living dead. It teaches that there is nothing absolutely true or untrue. It assures the living that we know nothing for certain. It humbles. It shrouds. It blackens. It enlightens.

Grief will make a new person out of you, if it doesn’t kill you in the making.

©1991 Stephanie Ericsson

Originally published in the Utne Reader as part of the cover story entitled “Facing Death”.

 

 

Did I Hold You Dear Enough?

 

There is a dangling participle,

an unfinished piece of knitting,

an echo that has nothing to ricochet from

when someone dies before love is fulfilled…

 

Defying Dismissal

EXILE:

Banishment from my tribe, my family of relatives and friends, business associates and acquaintanceswhich results in heightened perspective.

We who grieve are exiled in our society. Exiled by the turning away of a face so that they do not witness my agony. Exiled by the silence left as friends and family drift away … Soon enough, we sit in solitary confinement feeling as if no one else has ever felt what we feel. The irony is that what we are experiencing happens to most everyone. Why is it that our tribe dismisses us for being so pitiful in our loss when what is happening is that we are growing stronger? We will eventually rise victorious, yet we are treated like cripples. The exile, the dismissal of this important time, should not be internalized. It doesn’t mean that our experience is trivial, but that our society isn’t ready for this caliber of enlightenment.

 

Soul Full

 

SOUL:

the energy that unites me with others while paradoxically making me distinctly unique; that which is left over for the living when someone dies.

 

Sometimes I tremble. I don’t know what makes me tremble. I suspect it is a mixture of fear and excitement. What I have experienced has changed

me forever. Can I tell you, really tell you, what it is like? You, reader, have you trembled without knowing why?

My flesh is recyclable. I am simply atoms, magnetically held together by this field of energy called a soul. I am matter. I am energy. I am chromosomes that give me a turned-up nose and black hair. Do these manifest my soul? What obligations do I have to these atoms that give me tangibility? Do I owe other masses of atoms–my fellow beings–something also? I owe all beings, tangible, intangible, animate and inanimate, honor and respect. As I brush up against them, they validate my existence.

And how does this relate to us when we are ghosts? Ghosts have given up the atoms that made them tangible to others, so therefore–do they exist? Does energy exist without matter? Is the soul the energy that makes electrons orbit around the nucleus? And if that is true, then when these pieces of matter are disintegrated, is the soul released into the universe without any glue to keep it together? Does it stay together, or dos it waft into all the other energy that swirls around the universe? Does it keep its own distinction, as those who believe in previous lives assume? Or does it blend into the tapestry of souls that have existed previously or will exist? Then, if it were to do this, whoa re we really? Are we all part of one another? Are we all part of the big One?

 ≈

Have I breathed in the energy that once help my dead husband’s atoms together, so that energy now holds some of my atoms together? Is he part of me, after years of exchanging ‘living’ molecules of saliva in kissing, breath in sleeping next to each other for years? He entered me and left me, and then there was our daughter, another energy field, gluing atoms together that are offspring of our combined genes. His energy and mine bind her together so that she is a person. His energy, if it is his soul, and my energy, if it is my soul, united to form another soul. Separate. Yet distinct in herself. Yet resembling the eye he wore, the nose I wear. In her we joined as one. In her, we blended our souls in a conspiracy of energies.

So, is he really dead? As I look at her, as I walk through this life, doing things we would have done together, alone, I know that he is not here, but as I look at her, I also know that he is here. My natural, earthbound logic wants to tell me that something cannot be true and untrue at the same time. He is dead and gone, never to be seen, felt, heard again. Yes, I say to my earthly logic. Yes, this is true as we know it.

But can I assume that there are other ways of knowing? Other ways of seeing that aren’t bound to the limitations of cones and rods and retinas? Can I see through my heart? Can I see through that intangible soul that is one with all other souls on planes of existence where all things are known, where all time is moot, and where all limitations are simply a necessity for existence on a plane called earth?

When I hear a thought that is foreign to my normal way of thinking, is it Jim, giving me that thought, telling me what I need to know at that moment? When I have a dream, is it a time when I transcend my my earthly form to join other souls for a night, so that they might teach me, cajole me, mystify me? When I have an awakening, an ah-ha!, is it my soul hearing what the other souls are telling me?

More to come…

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