|
Grief, not
insanity
Early on in my widowhood, a friend, older
in widowhood than me, told me, “Welcome to the club no one wants
to be a member of.”
Much later in my widowhood, I got an email from another friend,
newly bereaved and grappling with its terror. “I know who I was
before I met Richard. I know who I was while I was married to
him. But I don’t know who I am now. No idea. It’s insane. Did
this happen to you?”
The email I wrote her back said, in its subject line, “Grief,
not insanity.”
Life, love,
death, grief, love
Widowhood is the part of loving and being
loved no one tells you about, though it’s right there in the
marriage vows, not even in the fine print, “Till death do us
part.” But the inevitability of grief goes unmentioned in any of
the numberless love songs, poems, and promises which so
cavalierly use the word “forever.”
The theft of those we love will take place: either that,
or we shall be stolen from those who love us. The time and
circumstances are hidden, unpredictable. Yet the eventual theft
is absolutely certain. No exceptions. For those who are left
stranded in life, grief is the result. Any human being audacious
enough to love someone, even imperfectly or partially (as all of
us, being human beings, do) eventually gets a bill. Grief is
that bill. It is the check presented only to those who had
the feast of having loved and been loved.
Grief's
unbidden privilege
Nothing about grief is comfortable, and little about it
is understandable. But I hope, as you explore and
participate in Club Ned, that despite the
powerful and humbling feelings which may buffet you
---feelings which range from blind terror to a missing as
profound and agonizing as if your own heart were being cut
from you with a paring knife to blankness, numbness, and
unreality, you will recognize that they
are not insanity.
There is not much that gives even a small measure of
ease as you walk this path of fire. But calling what you
are experiencing by its true name does. That name is grief.
Though the club of the bereaved is a club which no one wants
to be a member of, it is also a club whose initiation fee is
what everyone, everyone, wants desperately. Those who
grieve have loved and been loved.
In that sense, we who grieve are privileged.
Dear broken-hearted brother or sister, whoever you are
and whatever your circumstances: what you feel now, whatever it
is, is grief, not insanity.
|
