A Time to Grieve

a time to heal

Dear readers,

I’m not one to share my emotions in the moment, tend to process them slowly, privately, until I can see them clearly enough to put them into writing, but I wanted to say a few words to explain my absence these past two months. In the beginning of December we found out my father was seriously ill and the period that followed went by in a blur. It was frantic, relentless, but, looking back now, I would give anything to be thrown in it all again, because it would mean he would still be with us. He passed away last Sunday, quietly, peacefully, leaving an enormous vacuum behind him.

Dad, on the way to Epidauros, in the 1980s.

Dad loved language and words, so I will share the etymology of grief.

grief: middle English, from Old French grever ‘burden, encumber’, based on Latin gravare, from gravis ‘heavy, grave.’

And, finally, a poem I wrote a while ago, a reminder that death is not the ending we so often perceive it to be.

Whalefall

People gasp at the beauty of a breaching
whale, at the contradiction of a weightless 
weight, or perhaps the momentary trespass 
of what we think of as our element, 
the intersection of boundaries revealing 
the extraordinary.

But it is not in the breach that I see the poetry
of a whale, but in its death; in the slow, silent
sinking to the ocean floor, its body’s weight
leading it one last time to a purpose far more
noble than entertainment, as it falls to rest
amongst its own, breaching the final boundary,
turning, in death, into life again.

If you feel inclined to share your own thoughts, please do. A Greek friend recently told me that a joy shared is doubled, a sorrow shared is halved.

Take care,

Angie