"You have to understand," she said. "Grief lasts forever."
"Like death," I said.
"Like death. Except death is someone else's condition, and grief is all yours."
"I feel worse now than I did shortly after she died."
"And you'll feel even worse next year. And worse the year after that, unless you find a way to transform your grief."
"We're back to that."
"We've never left it," she said. "Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at once. But it is your guest for a lifetime."
"How should I treat this gift? This unwelcome, uninvited guest."
"Think of the one who sent it to you," she said.
The above excerpt is from a conversation Roger Rosenblatt shared in Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats. See my post, Beside Myself, for my thoughts inspired by reading this memoir.
It did not escape me that the computer went black just as I went to hit send on an email scheduling a mass for the one-year anniversary of your death.
Your sense of humor was always a touch . . . little brother poking the bear?
And your infinite wisdom / innate annoyance of computer devices that should work a certain way certainly fits.
I also notice how often you order up a Paul Simon song (with or without Garfunkel), sometimes just at the moment I turn onto your and Mom’s street.
I could not and would not forget you lived there too and think of you each time I visit anyway.
I think of you each time one of the girls knows some random cultural touchpoint because you explained the archaic origin of it. I thought of how unfair it was that I learned my most recent one from a book and not from you, even though I heard it in your voice.
You are everywhere and nowhere.
And that is both comforting and irritating – just the way one of your factual and deeply researched pontifications were.
The same book that taught me that the “slang phrase, up shit’s creek, [is] from [the] Pawnee Indians, [a] reference to the Republican River which was polluted with buffalo manure, [meaning] in deep trouble” is also the one that offered this description of GRIEF:
The state of mind brought about when love, having lost to death, learns to breathe beside it. See also love.
Kayak Morning / Roger Rosenblatt
The way I found this book was coincidental – if you believe in those.
It was sitting kitty-corner atop the stack of memoirs at the edge of the stairs to the children’s section. I saw it as my foot hovered above the top step preparing to leave.
Had the librarian, whom I know personally, pulled it from the shelf and let it float there like flotsam in the hopes that I would see and read it? Did she know I needed stream-of-consciousness, nature-inspired writerly reflections on grief?
Chopping Potatoes 