Loss

lossGrief is a stalker. It lurks in the cabinets and in the waiting room at the dentist’s and behind the switch on the hall light. It twines itself inside the click of pens and the heels of socks. Tea bags are infused with it, as are cereal boxes, computer games an the mail as it is slipped through the slot. Contrary to reputation, it never looks drab; it doesn’t care a whit about time. The hummingbird has it, flapping furiously, as did the weary faced gorilla eating its banana at the zoo. It isn’t elegant. It isn’t easy or smooth. It rises with the sun and hides in the corners of fog. Surprisingly it prefers hello to goodbye. It shows up on the beach and frayed the nerves in the manner of a gunshot or a siren whizzing by. It is big, hairy, inarticulate, possessing just one word, why. It is brain freeze and sour lemons and a knife to the belly and a thrum- thrumming of the heart- combined. Grief makes us clumsy. Always falling and attempting to rise.

When it comes to grief and loss, we have to be gentle with ourselves. Carol Edgarian articulated it beautifully in Three Stages of Amazement in her character Lena. Grief comes and goes and the stages that were explained in an earlier writing will not follow a particular pattern. Do not beat yourself up when after a while of “handling your emotions”, you are slapped in the face with grief again. Acknowledge what it is, accept it as natural and own the feelings. swim in the feelings until your fingers get all pruney. Only through the process of experiencing grief can we being to heal.