Going Underground
I grow tired sometimes writing about grief. Partly, I suspect because I think, who wants to hear it all the time. But when you’re writing every day about what you see and what you feel, it’s hard to avoid. Yesterday, for instance, I was watching a movie, and someone mentioned hand embroidery and I teared up thinking of all the things my late wife embroidered. And it made me think of the time we spent together on the Nueces because that little river would often run full but then go underground only to spring up again, just as my grief did yesterday.
On the other hand, however, I’ve come to realize that grief is pretty much a constant in all our lives, especially as we age, because loss is a constant. We lose things, we lose pets, we lose people we love. Every one of my friends has lost someone, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands, and wives. And now that I think about it, I could probably write about grief every day, and someone somewhere would find it meaningful because it would touch their experience.
So, that was what happened to yesterday. I thought of my wife. And I thought of my neighbor who just lost her husband. And I thought of a friend who lost her husband, and I thought of another friend who lost his wife, and the list goes on. An ordinary day of the dead, I guess. Just part of the burden we all carry. And while I was thinking, I put on a vinyl record I bought the other night. The music washed over me as I sat in the quiet of my house. And that little bit of grief became part of the song, and the song became part of me, and off I went, singing a sad song, but singing. And today is another day, and there may be sunshine.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale