The Reservoir
They say you learn how to grieve as a child by watching those around you. I never thought much about it until now with the passing of my wife. Then I started taking an inventory. My mother lost her parents as a child, and my dad lost her at 47. I was 21. My great-grandmother on my father’s side, lost her husband at 68. Her three daughters, including my grandmother lost their husbands at 51, and 62, and they all lived another 20 plus years each. My dad remarried and outlived his second wife. All of them were happy, loving, and caring people. Death came and paid a visit, but it was a passing thing and life went on.
I suspect for all of them, grief was there, but simply as a part of their lives. It’s a big leap, to make that assumption, but that’s what is happening to me. When grief first came last August, it was a raging torrent, wiping the landscape clean, now it has subsided to a more or less gently flowing river, mixing with all those other little tributaries of grief I’ve felt over my life for all those I’ve loved and lost, the one’s whose pictures adorn my walls.
On occasion these days, the river even sinks beneath the sand of my life to go underground. As it does, I imagine it is feeding my memory reservoir. My life with my wife mixes with my life with my mother and my grand-mother and my aunts and uncles. And that’s a fine thing to do. Because that reservoir of memories feeds little springs that bubble up in odd places, flowing out in the open, pure and cold. When it happens, I pause to drink from those springs, refreshing myself with the cool water of the past. I remember. I am grateful for what was given, for what I had. I move forward. I carry them with me. We make new memories.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale