I shall sieve through our twenty years, until
I almost reach the sob in the intellect,
The truth that waits for me with its loud grief,
Sensible, commonplace, beyond understanding.
Because your loss is so sore, something within you expects the world to understand. You were singled out. Now you are on your own. Yet life goes on. That makes you angry: sometimes, you look around at your family or the others who have been hit by this loss; it does not seem to have hurt them as much. But you remember that behind the façade they are heartbroken too. You have never experienced anything like this. During grief, the outer landscape of your life is in the grip of a grey weather; every presence feels ghostly. You are out of reach. You have gone way into yourself. Your soul lingers around that inner temple which is empty now save for the sad echo of loss.
Grief Is a Journey That Knows Its Way
Despite its severity, the consolation at a time of grief is that it is a journey. Grief has a structure; it knows the direction and it will take you through. It is amazing how time and again, one of the most consoling factors in experience is that each experience has a sure structure; this is never obvious to us while we are going through something. But when we look back, we will be able to pick out the path that offered itself. Experience always knows its way. And we can afford to trust our souls much more than we realize. The soul is always wiser than the mind, even though we are dependent on the mind to read the soul for us. Though travel is slow on the grief journey, you will move through its grey valley and come out again onto the meadow where light, colour, and promise await to embrace you. The loneliest moment in grief is when you suddenly realize you will never see that person again. This is an awful shock. It is as if all the weeks of sorrow suddenly crystallize in one black bolt of recognition. You really know how total your loss is when you understand that it is permanent. In this life there is no place that you will ever be able to go to meet again the one who has gone. On the journey of grief, this is a milestone. You begin thereafter to make your peace with the shock.
We Grieve for Ourselves
Gradually, you begin to understand more deeply that you are grieving primarily over your own loss. The departed one is gone home and is gathered now in the tranquillity of Divine Belonging. When you realize that it is for yourself that you are grieving, you begin to loosen your sorrowful hold on the departed one.
Part of what has had you holding on so desperately is the fear that if you let go, you would lose that person forever. Now you begin to glimpse the possibilities of being with him or her in a new way. If you loosen the sad grip of grief, a new belonging becomes possible between you. This is one of the most touching forms of belonging in the world: the belonging between us and our loved ones in the unseen world. It is a subtle and invisible belonging for which the crass obviousness of modern culture has no eye. Yet this invisible belonging is one in which so many people participate.
Though the silent weeping of your heart lessens, you get on, more or less, with your life, yet a place is kept within you for the one who is gone. No other will ever be given the key to that door. As years go on, you may not remember the departed every day with your conscious mind. Yet below your surface mind, some part of you is always in the person’s presence. From their side, our friends in the unseen world are always secretly embracing us in their new and bright belonging. Though we may forget them, they can never forget us. Their secret embrace unknowingly shelters and minds us.
The bright moment in grief is when the sore of absence gradually changes into a well of presence. You become aware of the subtle companionship of the departed one. You know that when you are in trouble, you can turn to this presence beside you and draw on it for encouragement and blessing. The departed one is now no longer restricted to any one place and can be with you anyplace you are. It is good to know the blessings of this presence. An old woman whose husband had died thirty years earlier told me once that the last thing she did each night before sleep was to remember him. In her memory, she went over his face detail by detail until she could gather his countenance clearly in her mind’s eye. She had always done this since he died, because she never wanted him to fade into the forgetfulness of loss.
While it is heartbreaking to watch someone in the throes of grief, there is still a beauty in grief. Your grief shows that you have risked opening up your life and giving your heart to someone. Your heart is broken with grief, because you have loved. When you love, you always risk pain. The more deeply you love, the greater the risk that you will be hurt. Yet to live your life without loving is not to have lived at all. As deeply as you open to life, so deeply will life open up to you. So there is a lovely symmetry and proportion between grief and love. Conamara is a dark landscape full of lakes and framed with majestic mountains. If you ask any person here how deep a lake is, they say that they often heard the ancestors say that the lake is always as deep as the mountain near it is high. The invisible breakage of grief has the same symmetry. Meister Eckhart said, “Depth is height.” There is a haunting poem from the third century B.C. by Callimachus which imaginatively captures grief and the richness of absence as memory:
They told me, Heraclitus,
They told me you were dead.
They brought me bitter news to hear
And bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered,
How often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking
And sent him down the sky.
But now that you are lying,
My dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes,
Long, long ago at rest.
Still are your gentle voices,
Your nightingales, awake—
For death he taketh all away
But these he cannot take.
Translated by William Cory
The Imagination and the Altars of Absence
In contrast to the discursive mind, the imagination seems more at home in its portraiture of absence and loss. This should not surprise, since the hallmark of the imagination is suggestion rather than description. The imagination offers you only the most minimal line in order to permit and encourage you to complete the picture for yourself. Consequently, the most enthralling part of a poem or a story is actually that which is omitted or absent. It is often at the very end of a short story that the threshold that would lead into the real story is reached. The writer has not cheated you but rather brought you to a door that you must open yourself. You are invited to people this absence with your own imagined presence. Your imagination begins to take you into a shape of experience that calls you beyond the familiar, the factual, and the predictable. By imaginatively acquainting you with places from which you have been absent, it enlarges and intensifies your presence. This often happens magically when you visit an art gallery. Art galleries are temples to colour. Art reminds one of what Keats said so memorably: “I am sure of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.”