There is no one at the door now
Everything is suddenly very silent.
I’ve lost those whom I
loved before. I’ve lost many. But I seem to have forgotten how I got through
that grief. Sometimes I wonder if I ever really did. Maybe I didn’t get rid of
it at all. Maybe life just grew around it.
This time feels
similar. Not because I don’t feel it, but because there has been so much
happening that I couldn’t just curl up in bed and cry. I had to move. I had to
keep going. That’s what I hate about being an adult. You never seem to get
enough time to fully lament what deserves to be lamented. I don’t even know if
that is a good thing or a bad thing.
Grief comes in
fragments. When I’m at home, busy with things, it’s easy not to think about it.
Going out is easier. You can stay distracted. But coming back home is the
hardest part, because the welcome that used to be there is gone.
It’s been a week. And
this week has been completely silent.
We used to clean the
house every day, sometimes twice. There was always mud, or dirt, or something
that needed attention. Toward the end, it was the accidents that kept us
washing the floors. But this week, I haven’t mopped even once, and the floor is
still clean. No mud. No dirt. It feels like you were responsible for so much of
the energy that filled this place.
My days used to begin
with you. In the last few months, sometimes the first thing I did was check if
you were still breathing. Then I would feed you and give you your medicine. I
missed it on some days. Life was busy. I didn’t spend as much time with you as
I wish I had.
Sometimes I wonder if
you ever felt hurt by that, if you noticed my attention drifting, if you
resented it. But you never seemed cross with me. How did you have such a pure
heart?
Even now, my body is
careful. When I open the door, I still step mindfully, as if you might be there
and I might trip. But there is no one there anymore.
So, how long until my body unlearns how to
do that?
Acceptance sounds like
the wise answer. There was nothing I could have done to stop this. Nature
always wins. But nature doesn’t seem to have the same urgency when it comes to
healing the heart as it does when it takes someone away.
Still, I’m grateful.
Grateful that you left on a day when I was there. If it had happened when I
wasn’t around, I don’t think I could have carried it. Maybe that is just
coincidence. But I choose to believe it wasn’t, that you were being kind to me,
as you always were.
I don’t know how adults are supposed to
carry this, so I keep doing ordinary things – washing, walking, opening doors like
nothing has changed.
No one really seems to
have the time or space to sit with these feelings anymore. We’ve had brief
conversations about it. What happened, where you went. One moment you were
here, and the next you weren’t.
And then come the
questions that don’t have answers.
When you left your
body, where did your awareness go? The soul, or whatever we choose to call it.
What happened to that part of you that made you so gentle, so loving, so
present? Did it just disappear, or does it linger somewhere, close to us? And, if you are there, why can’t we feel you anymore?
I asked my father
something similar the other day, whether the soul stays for a while after the
last breath or if it leaves immediately. He didn’t have an answer, of course.
Then I asked if we had made a mistake by burying the body so quickly. What if
something was still there and now it’s stuck?
Saying it out loud
made me realize how it sounded. He asked me, half gently and half amused, how I
would even know if soil is “soul-proof”. Then he added,
half serious and half joking, that this is why he doesn’t want to be buried
when his time comes, and that he would prefer to be cremated instead.
This is what grief does. It
turns into questions that sound foolish when spoken, but don’t feel foolish
when they live inside you.
Maybe the real trick
is finding someone who understands that these questions aren’t coming from
ignorance, but from grief.
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