Being there
I have been reading the eulogies and exploring the tribute web pages people at my grief group have been sharing. I will admit, it’s hard to do, hard to step into that grief, hard to face the grief inside me in their mirror. Because I know their hurt, intimately. I’m still feeling it, every day. It is merely a question as to which is the stronger on any given day, me or the grief. I read and I feel the love pouring out of the words, and I recognize the pain so much like my own, and I ache for them because we are now family, and I ache for me because I didn’t want to join this family like this. And as nice as my new family is, I know they’d understand if I said I didn’t want to join this family at all. They didn’t, either.
Sometimes I want to turn away because it’s just too much. I have no protective distance of sympathy; it’s empathy and it is all very real to me whether I read about someone’s loss of their brother or son, even though I lost neither. I lost my beloved. And that is why it’s the same, because those people were beloved of my sisters in grief. The relationships, the details, the circumstances, were all different, but in the only thing that counts, it’s all the same. Love is love.
But I don’t turn away. I read. I witness. I accept what my new family wants to share with me, because I know how much I yearn for others to feel with me, remember with me, honor him with me. I know I want that, and therefore, I must be that for others. When they do it for me, I don’t feel so alone, on a path where loneliness is part of the process. So I can’t imagine doing otherwise, for I know the comfort of just one person spontaneously remembering him in conversation without my mentioning him, as if, with their words or even their silent witnessing, they have grabbed my hand and cradled my heart.