(Sarah McLachlan singing at the link below)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX3kuwVy1sE
My daughter shared this quote with me from C.S. Lewis when this past November, she and her husband lost their baby boy at 23 weeks of pregnancy: “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history…there is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape…not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.”
My daughter, my sister and I noticed when we were at the cemetary at my grandson Robbie's funeral that the gravesite next to my dad and Robbie's was totally decorated for Christmas (Robbie's funeral was a week before Christmas). We were looking at the teddy bears and ornaments and we noticed the date on the gravestone -- the little girl, her name was Gabriella, had died when she was 11 months old in 1960. The three of us were silent and then my sister commented to my daughter that it's obvious that families do not 'get over' the death of their children......here we were 50 years later and family members were making sure that Gabriella's grave was decorated for Christmas. As we walked around the children's section of this very large cemetary, we looked at dates on gravestones and continued to notice and comment that 20, 30, 40, 50+ years later, so many children are remembered with love.
for me, grief is like a hole in the heart. You can always feel it, but sometimes it feels smaller and sometimes so much bigger. At least with time, it seems to feel smaller more often. But it's always there. There's that memory thing again. If I did not grieve for my loved ones, (because I got that memory erased) would that make me a better person? I think not. I've never seen my father's grave. Not even a photo of it.
ReplyDeleteMimi: I think that a hole in the heart is a good description of grief. I also would describe it as a 'weight' on me or a 'pressure' squeezing in on all sides of me. And, as you said, always there. Interesting that you have never seen your father's grave. I've been to my dad's grave three times -- that place in the cemetary is to me so totally unrelated and completely removed from the person who was my dad. Mariann
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