Thursday, April 16, 2015

Shapeshifter

With one comment on one of those social media sites, realization comes.  Not like a lightening bolt or a quickening of the pulse, but a warm and still yet cold sidling into a place of truth.  Like a puzzle piece coming together.  She has lost a dear friend and is discovering, perhaps for the first time, the cold, burning, jagged edge of grief.

I wrote: Death is, to use the old meanings, a Terrible and Awful transition. The irony is that they're the one person you want to talk to about their Leaving and the hole their absence leaves fully expresses Ache. Having felt the loss of both my mothers I wish there was more comfort I could offer. Some say time is a help while others have platitudes but I will just say, grief is a multicolored and multi-dimensional creature, one that continually changes shape and color. 


 Later, sitting with my thoughts, away from The Others, I felt for the first time, not that metallic edge, but something else.  Something unforeseen and foreign.  The grand They have always said visiting a gravesite spawns healing but I've always previously decreed it spurns it.  Who resides there anyway?  Formaldehyde and false retribution.  Rebellion and Lionhearted fire aside, on my way to a solo visit by the sea, I detoured and sat for a spell beside both Rose and Mary's graves.  Turns out, maybe there is some truth to it.  Floods of tears, yes but also a reluctant sigh.  It really does change shape, grief.  We look for signs and rational or not, I believe the moment rang true.

The morning was rainy, I almost changed my mind a gazillion times.  Why would I visit a graveyard?  What does it hold for me?  I was traveling through the wondering maze of headstones, thinking how stupid the whole endeavor was and thinking I would spend hours trying to find what?  Buried bones?  When I found the marker, the sun came and there They were.  Supine in a sunny, tree-lined cemetery listening to the bees do their business, I felt Something.  I am on the other side of it, finally.  No longer feeling a desire to throw myself at Destruction or mutilate tender skin to escape the Monsters inside but instead a Reckoning.  It's a word with so many connotations but in this moment it means not Biblical destruction, the kind found in dysfunctional families, or the tallying of Debts unpaid; those debts of Rights and Wrongs, but rather something akin to pieces matching up.  This was then.  This is now.  That was Her.  This is Her.  This is Me.  That is Tomorrow.  

This is a song that came my way quite randomly tonight; it feels appropriate but I have no emotional reaction to it.  Death songs have currently ceased to captivate me.  But his voice, those chords... there's something beckoning about it, right?  




Image: Passage Orageux, 1900

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