Once you were the darkness that consumed the center of my heart. Once I would have given everything to have you back, to change time and regain you.
But not any more. I know your mother feels very differently, but you lived beneath her heart for almost a year, and she loves you in a way I can never do.
For me you are a memory of a hope, hope for a future that was lost the day you were born. To have you back, to have that future back would mean that I would have to give up my today. Give up all the ten years since, give up your little brother and sister, give up the woman who I loved and who has grown to became the woman I still love, give up myself and the man I have become.
That seems too much for me to ask, and yet in a far corner of my heart I feel like that you're dying again because I would refuse to ask for it if I could.
So all I can do is grieve for you, my dear, and for me; for the world that never was, and now never will be.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawnsBryn Rose Gellar March 1 2002 - March 2 2002
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
3 comments:
Nothing refills the void of a lost child. I often think that is the single largest reason people cling to the thought of an after life -- the idea of finally filling those emptied arms with the lost one again. I have no words of sufficient comfort because there are none.
I am glad to follow your progression in acceptance here.
For you, a poem by Mary Oliver, "Heavy":
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying.
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It is not the weight you carry
but how you carry it—
books, bricks, grief—
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
When you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind and maybe
also troubled—
roses in the wind,
The sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
--I am glad to see both your laughter and your admiration.
Sad and, even more so, because of the honesty. We put those whom we’ve loved – or maybe it’s singular, maybe we can never really love twice – we put them in a little room that grows darker as the years pile on. We really do bury our dead.
But enough of that. Let’s sit in the sun, tell fart jokes and remember our victories, the times things clicked and life won. Wrote a comment the other day to RAW about the Arctic. Now that was fun, 40 below, a blue world with super-intelligent dogs and an occasional bear come to raid the camp.
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