Dear Grave,
At the outset I would have you know what you have been to me. For all the things that men have said to you and to one another about you, there has always been something unique about you. Perhaps we are all simply more blustery talk than real conviction (and I mean the kind that sits deep in your bone marrow). Don’t we all know such a thing is true: it is easier to speak about the things we fear than to see them right in front of us; easier to speak of Fear itself as some abstract thing, rather than the very tangible darkness that crouches in the corners of every room of our lives. What day has not had shadows in it, even at high noon? And are we not prone to laugh at those shadows, right up until we feel them crawling up our own back? Dry throats and shuddering hands give us away every time. All that bravado gone up like dew in the desert summer.
And so it is right to tell you this: there are some ghosts that I have called apparitions so that I might start to see them as such. They are not, in that moment, ghostly at all, but alarmingly, startlingly real. Grief has come in all its rough robes to inhabit my living room. Quiet has taken up more of the space of life than anyone might think. Even Heartbreak - such a dramatic thing as it is - has ridden in the passenger seat in early mornings and late nights.
I have known for some time that you are not like these. You are not something that I am able to shape into an appropriate narrative, neatly folding the sheets so that you are ordered and arranged in context. You are not a passing shade of what has made my heart heavy, but that in due time will come be only a distant memory. More than any other of these - more than perhaps even my own awareness - you are real. As real as the wet dirt itself, you inhabit a space and that space is not moveable.
You are the total of all the parts that are no more - the fully collected substance that has ceased to be, but is still something, even though it is no more. Yes, it is not that you are nothing. That would be easier, wouldn’t it? Then I would not be writing to you at all. You would have come, and then wholly gone from my life. But you are indeed something of weight and shape. You are the very clay and dust of what I will no longer have, nor be, nor hear. You are the collection of all the emptiness, the wellspring of all the black night that come running out like dark rivulets across my life.
Is this part of what is so disorienting about you for all of us still alive - that you are not just something that has happened, but that you continue to be the unhappening of our living?
I know what you are - and it is more of something than most anything else I have seen, which is to say that you are more than what we may have relegated you to in our vernacular. You are present at more than just the literal death of any of us. You are the pillar of all that has been buried. And has not each of us buried much?
It is right, then, to tell you what you have properly come to mean in my life. It would be far too easy (and dishonest) to tell you that I hate you, or that you have no hold here, or that you have destroyed my life. Wouldn’t it be easier to draw the lines of this in such a way?
It is not true, but the truth has been hidden from me for some time. I have not quite known why until writing this to you.
When I saw you first in my life (or perhaps just saw you most clearly), you came crawling into the corners of the daylight, like some kind of envoy bearing the news of the inevitable nightfall of winter. You came once, and then again, and then more frequently. It was not that you came upon me all at once, but with careful forewarning. And when you came in full, it was as if the inevitability of your arrival was familiar to me. I knew that you would come in full daylight; knew you would bring your entourage with you, with very careful order and due process. That is one of the most surprising things about your coming: it has been so clean in so many ways. Sorrow is messy and Darkness is all chaos and fear. And even if they travel as companions to you, they are not you. You, Grave, are much more structured. There is no in-between with you. The old saying is wrong; I have seen no “one foot in the grave.” It is either everything, or not at all.
Coming, you had come to take up proper residence, and as such it became clear that you were not something I could ignore, nor someone that I could carry on past. Emotions are easy to swallow or simply drown. But realities - the kind that you can feel between your hands - demand time and words.
You changed all of my life, because you changed every day of my life. You were waiting for me at the kitchen table. You sat outside in the summer sun, ready to discuss your priorities. You would sweep in by the fireplace in the frosty dark, tracing your finger upon the list of tomorrow’s items. All your notes of what must change - of what you had already reordered in my life - strung across the house, and scribbled on the walls like a madman’s reminders of what his life was and is no longer.
It was with a very slow realization that I came to see you were not just another imposition on my life. You had come with all the appropriate tooling and support to rework the entirety of my life. You intended to unravel all the braids that were themselves woven into the tapestry of living, and start afresh. You had come with entirely new yarn, and demanded that it be woven in - no matter that it stood out against the colors and textures already present. In fact, all the better. You would rather it stand out - coarse, and dark, and smelling of dead-end heartbreak.
Change like this, like the kind you brought so directly and intently upon me, does not happen suddenly. That is not to say the unweaving of life does not happen in a moment. Some days it seemed like you were burning whole tapestries. But the re-braiding was a gradual thing. Day by day I knew you were putting the pieces together, and I knew that they would be changed. But I myself was changed by your presence, and a person can only process so much revelatory change at once.
And as the days carried on, it became clear that more had changed than I had even expected. The house had been stripped to the studs, not just redecorated. You had moved water lines and removed entire walls. I was a stranger in my own life. But that is not enough (don’t you hear such statements regularly). I was a foreigner to the very language of my life. You had sprung a new world upon me, and I was lost in it because all the words looked the same and meant something altogether different:
Living was not the living I knew. Laughter carried guilt and loss and distance. Silence was startlingly loud, even as it was craved.
You were not so much a thing that I experienced as an agent who moved me along. You were hurrying me towards newness in a familiar place, but it was newness that I did not want and did not look towards. And yet it came all the same.
This is where we have been then, for all this time - living among the transformations of your presence. And while it would be easy to say that you have only brought me to a new place, the truth is far more involved. The movement only continues; the change only carries on. Time is most truthfully measured by the passage of things, not by any single point, and you are of the same nature. Everything is changing always with you, and all of it is movement is along a line I have never wanted and never asked for.
You and I have never once been able to put the shovels down. New ground is broken, always.
Of course that is no surprise to you. Your very person is defined by the newly turned over soil of what we have lost and left behind.
It was this, though, that I missed for so long. I have seen your reshaping of my life, Grave, and been cut afresh every time by what it is that has been unraveled. I see the threads torn apart, or scorched on the ground. I see the weave frayed out like dry grass. But I missed the most obvious part of all of this - my life came out something new; it has become something new altogether, and that by way of the very same threads that were before, and then more. It was not that you had taken away my life (or perhaps it was not only that). It was that I held both the life that was, and the death that now is, in the same hands.
I have, in spite of all that seems to have gone to ash, actually been given something which I did not have before: you.
I said that you were the substance of my loss. That was exactly the point I could not see for all of its glaring reality. For all that was gone, I was not left empty-handed, not really. I was left with you. And you were nothing less than the new, most real part of my life. You really were - and are - the thread that has been woven in to this whole tapestry. But is there not at the very least something justifying in that? To know that what I have lost has been eradicated, but carried up into something, and that this same something has come to me now - there is more than loss in that. There is an offer.
This is key, though. Realizing that you, Grave, are the life I have been given (can I call it “new” without wincing?) does not mean that things are set in order. Quite to the contrary, it creates a new kind of tension in my life. You are not good simply because you have come to me as you have. But neither are you an inherent evil. You are more a raw substance than a determined thing. I was tricked by the wood grain of a coffin - you were in fact closer to clay.
And that is the offer: could all that was lost - in the inevitability of becoming of something else - actually become something more than it was? More life. More meaning. More resilience. More steadiness. It is nearer to a dare than anything. What might become of a life steeped in death if you were to live in the tension of all that has died? Would not the things which came out bright and laughing be so beautiful that they may as well be stars? Would not joy in the face of such tension between what is lost and what remains be the kind of joy that will never go out?
If such a thing were possible, it would be more than satisfying. It would change the world. What more could you wish for? What more, Grave, could I wish for?
We are not done, you and I. Nor would I say that we are at peace with one another. Not yet. You really have consumed parts of me that I never wished to lose, and brought all my hopes crashing down upon themselves like so much fragile glass. I would not pretend to say that the tension between us is resolved. It is not. There is much that I have lost. There is much that I will lose in the years to come. Are not the wrinkles of the old the proof of what you have gathered - and are still gathering - to yourself? But I do not see this as a waste, either. To lose parts of oneself is the greatest act of love possible. It is to give away, expecting that such dying will be worth more. And is not such love the highest a man can reach? Is not loss of such kind the greatest measure of meaning?
I know that one day we will come face to face again, Grave, and you will once more unweave the tapestry of my life to form something new. But perhaps that is part of the gift you have given to me too in all of this. You will, if all of this is right, find that you are already a familiar thread in this life. Perhaps you will find that there is no unraveling to do, and that all this is left of this life are the ragged pieces that were not worth giving away. And so you will gather into yourself only the remains of a life that was never one person’s to begin with.
Maybe then you will hear those words: O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (1 Cor 15:55).
Utterly and beautifully profound and true. It’s comforting meeting another soul on Grief’s journey who expresses our travels so well❤️
As usual, you leave me at a loss for words…as you seem to so eloquently express the deepest senses of my soul. Thank you for your gift, your vulnerability, transparency and courage! I love, pray for, miss you and TrinWyn and Lauren so much! ♥️. Happy Holy Saturday!