Grief, twisting and turning

You can try to avoid grief, and push it back, but it remains, fixed,  immutable. How you talk to it is about all the control you have, like trying to reason with a drunk.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Late November; full dark

Upon returning to the city I live in, when my sister was gone,  having died from lung cancer, everything was black. It often still is, but I push back the darkness and try to move through things. I remember distinctly, in late November, getting into my head that I should go for a late-night walk, past a particular red-brick house that was nowhere near my neck of the woods. There was freezing rain earlier that day, and toward midnight, snowdrifts undulated down our street. In the end, glazed-eyed and out of my mind with grief at losing my sister after a grueling autumn, I did not venture out. What would I say if I walked to this house? What would I do? I would still need to walk back in the hellaciously conspiring weather, if I did stop at that front door. I was lost and decided to stay lost at home.
Read more

Focus in the Face of Too Much

Focus seems the first casualty when it comes to using technology these days. Whether you're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or your drug, I mean social media, of choice, I feel that we are made to feel that everything should keep coming at us, from notifications (which you can deactivate) to program updates (which you can't) to videos or audio playing on your phone (which you think you can stop ... but you can't) to ads progressively creeping into your apps (which, again, you can't stop, except for after the fact). I read somewhere recently that the most precious thing we can have is our focus and that with our phones, these supercomputers in the palms of our hands, we readily hand over our focus. Sometimes it can be a good thing. Connecting with friends, family or loved. Finding out about something you're passionate about, whether art, music, books or comics. Or maybe you want to keep track of the snowfall today (it's Canada) or the news or something you are f...
Read more

Autumn; approaching full dark

Back in the fall, senseless with ongoing-but-unresolved grief, I wandered the streets of my hometown.  I was staying at my parents' by then, where I grew up, so this dark time afforded explorations of former neighbourhood haunts, usually under the sepulchral glow of the moon. My sister was dying from lung cancer, and fall was insultingly beautiful. It wasn't fair that autumn was beautiful, the leaves all changing hues, with that deep burning wine smell of leaves heavy in the air, and that she was still dying.  Among familiar streets and, at times, down by the St. Lawrence River shoreline, I often took pictures of the moon, trying to make sense of the senseless impeding death of my sister. No amount of walking revealed any order, but I got out and walked because it was better than not doing anything after debriefing my parents about the day's events, before or after their daily visits. Around that time, I had received an urgent consolatory note from an estranged acquaintance...
Read more