Swimming with the Turtles

[zig]

I wanted to share with all of you what a really good friend, who has always guided me to take the higher road sent me today. I also included her lovely message. She and I are gal'ing saturday night, as she invited me to a concert with her.



Dearest Zig,
One of my dear friends is experiencing much prolonged grief since deaths of her father then mother. She was sent this beautiful email which I will forward to you, knowing that grief is universal, regardless the cause.
I am glad we will enjoy some time and meaningful, beautiful music together Sat.
Love,
A

Have been thinking so much about your grief, your loss, and how easily I forget about its presence in your waking life and how it can violently shake your dreams. I must try to be distracted less, and attentive more…to remember that, as Shakespeare said:
“Grief lies within and the external manners of lament are merely shadows to the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortured soul.”
I forget that grief seems so much like fear, anxiety and ceaseless dread…. Has carved out our innards, and rings in our hollowed out body so loudly that we, at times, have to reduce life to rote and try to keep our feelings at some distance… as if they were living in some remote cabin by a lonely lake… whose cold waters we might very well like to jump into and drown.
I forget that grief acts like some other thing, because it does not want to show itself in its rawness, is ashamed about its nakedness…so, if it goes out, at all, it has to dress itself up and venture out in its dark cloak and veil, into the assault of the world, hoping that it won’t be seen and go about, anonymously on its daily rounds.
There is the adage that “time cures all” and we are encouraged to go with the flow, to bow and accept, to act by the grace of reason. But what if the flow is a raging torrent taking us to the precipitous falls…what if we get on bended knee and lower our head in consecration, only to have it ingloriously chopped off…what if there is no reason, but all is madness. Maybe it is better, like Dylan Thomas says, to “rage, rage at the dying of the light” and become a marauder in this imperfect, terrorized world.
I simply don’t know. I do believe that grief changes…that it goes from grief to the memory of grief and ultimately the world is restored….that there comes a time when we wake up and lift ourselves up. Like the sparrow I saw this morning, weighed down by life’s gravity, then opened it its wings so easily and flew over the bayberrys and up into a nearby Oak.
And I do believe, though it seem a feral beast, we can care for grief, can ritually set out a bowl for it, daily, and let it come near and perhaps it will eventually yield to the slightest/lightest of touches… or maybe we will have to settle for admiring its strange beauty and let that be enough, knowing that it still needs us.

I ran across a poem by Mary Oliver which contains some similar thoughts (though with better metaphors and craft):

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,
what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so
utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment
by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,
as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.

It’s a fine sentiment, and I hope you will be able to offer yourself that tenderness...