Sad news comes in. I go outside and, as always after a sorrow, I see that the world looks very slightly different. It is as if someone has shifted the angle or altered the colours or played about with the space. The entire planet has moved on its axis and nothing will be quite the same again.
This is not my sorrow; it is at one step removed. There is the strange moral sorting of emotions - as if one has to ask, ‘What belongs to me?’ Grieving for the loss of others is a strange business. It’s almost as if one doesn’t have permission. They are the one going through it, and it is theirs, and one must not encroach.
At the same time, there is a desperate desire for some magic wand one can wave to make everything better, even though nothing can be better. There is a rage, at the unfairness of life. The irrational part of me is furious that there are not-nice people out there who seem to sail through the years, hardly touched by tragedy, and then there are the good ones, the true ones and kind ones and loving ones, who get battered by the storm. Who came up with that plan? What are the fates damn well doing?
I scratch some paltry words which will make no difference whatsoever and send them and I think: there should be a primer for grief. Everyone should be taught about it in school. I think: why are we humans so bad at it? Why do we find it so hard to meet it in others and to deal with it for ourselves? It’s the one thing that will come to us all, and so we should have some kind of hard-wiring to know what do to.
I remember when my Dad died and being shocked by the raw, destabilising pain of the loss. He was old and he had run his race and he was ready to go. I remember thinking that I was prepared and that I would almost be glad for him, because he truly was finished, in body and mind. I wasn’t glad. It was a tearing shock, even though we knew it was coming, and I had to put myself back together, piece by piece. But I do recall, somewhere in that long, painful process, thinking, ‘Well, at least I’ll know what to say now, to someone whose loved one has died.’
I have no idea what to say.
I’ve grieved my mum and my stepfather and two dogs and a horse and a dear friend and I still don’t know what to say. Words, which are my delight and my love and my meaning, seem puny and pointless.
And yet, weirdly, in the end, words are what I shall go back to. I’m writing these ones now, in a slow attempt to make some kind of sense and invest some kind of honour and leave some kind of mark. I think of Joan Didion, and her devastating, majestic book about the death of her husband, perhaps the best book on grief I’ve ever read. I think: I’ll go back to Joan, because she knew what to say.
I think of Julia Samuel, the most wise, compassionate and humane writer on grief we have, and I say to myself, ‘Julia will have something to say.’
The poets will come into it too, because they had words for something which has no words.
As I write that last line I go, instantly, to my old friend Mary Oliver (because the poets who help me with life feel like real friends) and there she is, reliable and dazzling as always, waiting for me with the exact right words. As I read them, I think: how does she do that? But the beautiful thing is that she does, and I feel gratitude flood through my body as I read.
There she is, I think; there she is.
‘Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.’