Posts Tagged ‘Grief’
The Uninvited Day
Some days arrive uninvited. They just happen.
Bags are packed—sometimes decades earlier—then stowed away, waiting. Waiting for the uninvited day. When it comes, the bags tumble out of their hiding places, and the contents explode into life.
Yesterday was such a day.
I had an appointment at a medical office dealing with a disease no one wishes to face. It was, in itself, rather matter-of-fact: identify the disease, consider treatment options, make decisions, do my part as a credible member of the team seeking to eradicate the problem.
But then came the baggage.
The baggage carries the awareness of mortality—not so much my own, but of those I’ve loved. Sitting in the doctor’s office, I was reminded again of how many times my late wife must have had similar conversations. Her cycle of remission and relapse always included consultations like this: the tests, the scans, the waiting for results. I was there for much of it.
Those suitcases have been familiar companions for many years.
But yesterday I unpacked another one I didn’t expect: the one I now call Morbid Math.
Morbid Math began when the doctor alluded to my advanced age, as if age alone dictates outlook. Yes, the older we get, the more we must face our finitude. But as I told him, anyone—at any age—can drop dead in a moment. Statistics may predict probability, but statistics don’t govern individuality.
This is where the science of medicine must, if practiced well, meet the art of medicine. Options may narrow with age, but every life still deserves case-by-case care.
And that’s when the arithmetic began.
In just a few years, I will have lived twice as many years as my late wife. That realization stung. I could have done without it. But the uninvited day doesn’t ask permission to unpack what it brings.
Then came another calculation. I remarried thirty-one years ago this past August. Counting the years of our courtship, Beth and I were together twenty-two years—nineteen of them married. The sheer ratio of years makes comparisons absurd. Yet I know this: Beth and I grew up together, and Lucy and I are growing down together. Each love has its own trajectory.
The problem is that growing up was interrupted. And so, I’ve spent the years since trying, in some way, to complete the work Beth and I began. I got to watch our daughters grow up. She did not.
Thank you, Morbid Math, for that reminder.
Two lifetimes, divided unevenly, yet both defining who I am. Beth didn’t just influence me—she created part of me. But she never saw the whole. In that sense, the sum is zero.
She never saw me in my entirety. I robbed her of that.
I know, unequivocally, that she would have. We were on a trajectory toward that kind of honesty. We even talked about the changes we would make to become more fully ourselves—individually and together. But the equation ended before it could balance.
So yes, yesterday was the uninvited day.
One of the worst I’ve had since the day she died.
But even this arithmetic of loss holds its strange grace: that who I have finally become—the man willing to be raw and vulnerable—is the collaborative work of two women who loved me into wholeness.
Beth began the work. Lucy has helped me finish it.
*I cannot change the sums, but I can live them. And perhaps that, in the end, is
🎵 The Problem with Regret
I have hung my harp upon the years, yet in every wind that passes, I hear her name.
- from the journals of exile
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept;
we hung our harps upon the willows.”
— Psalm 137 : 1-2
I.
By the waters of memory, I sat down and wept,
And hung my harp on the limb of the years.
The wind in the reeds made a sound like forgiveness,
But it wasn’t forgiveness I heard — it was fear.
II.
Regret is a carrion bird, circling slow,
Feeding on grief that refuses to die.
Its shadow falls long over everything holy,
And whispers, you could have loved better than I.
III.
It never flies lonely — recrimination comes near,
A beast in the dark with a tongue made of blame.
They feast on the bones of what memory offers,
And leave me the echo, the ache, and the name.
Refrain
It wasn’t the box but the silence that fed them,
The years I mistook for the comfort of peace.
Now I open my hands and the feathers fall upward —
They vanish like breath, but the hunger won’t cease.
IV.
I walk through the hush where her laughter once stood,
Through the door that no heartbeat will open again.
And I hear from the willow the faintest of music —
A string half-broken still answering pain.
Coda
By the waters of memory, I sat down and wept,
And hung my harp on the limb of the years.
The song that I lost is the one that still finds me,
And silence itself is the sound that I fear.
The Problem with Regret
(from Random Musings)
Regret is a carrion bird.
It feeds on the grief of those who have loved and lost.
It seldom flies alone.
Its companion is another scavenger beast — recrimination.
As I walk the corridors of memory, both bitter and sweet,
I feel the air stir with their wings.
They circle close, patient and hungry.
I tell myself I am learning —
how I might have been a better man,
a better husband,
a better soul who held nothing back
from the one who withheld nothing from me.
But what I discover instead is a new sorrow.
It is regret itself —
made of things not done, not said,
and of the hurtful words once spoken.
Together they feast upon the bones of memory,
tearing at what flesh remains
until scarcely a heartbeat is left behind.
They shred the heart and leave the mind exhausted.
And I cry out, no more — let me remember no more.
For a moment I reach for the box
that has kept my memories safe these many years,
and begin to put them back,
thinking I might rest if I forget.
But then I remember:
it was not the box that fed these beasts,
but the silence.
And to return to silence
would only feed them again.
Vive la différence!
Recovering from Silence
I watch the women in my life — and who could resist? Each a marvel, her own constellation of strengths and mysteries. What strikes me most is their uncanny attunement: they know when something is right, and when it is not. Perhaps this is why their lives, more often than ours, run longer — they listen to themselves.
These days I find that same listening rising in me. My history, long buried in hidden folds, presses forward and names itself. The fiftieth anniversary of my marriage to Beth, my late wife, has brought me into strange country. Difference is not only what I admire in others; it is what I now confront in myself.
For years I kept my inner dialogue under lock. Sadness and joy alike I carried in silence. When I remarried, I spoke Beth’s name, but I hid my grief. I feared it would wound my wife to know sorrow still haunted me, so I consigned memory to the shadows. Silence gave sorrow room, but never joy.
Now the landscape shifts. What was once rolling and familiar has grown sharp and perilous. The gentle curves of remembrance have narrowed into hairpin turns; the easy hills have broken into sudden ridges, blind crests, and heart-stopping overlooks. Change no longer waits at a distance; it walks beside me.
I have wept more in the last month than in decades past. But the tears are welcome, because in speaking aloud — in sharing what I once held back — grief no longer stands alone. Joy has stepped out of hiding to take its place beside sorrow. And together they travel with me, companions at last.
Women are sometimes faulted for their sensitivity, their willingness to notice change within. But I am learning this is not theirs alone. It is human. And that discovery — that I too can listen, can open, can live — is the real difference.
Vive la différence!
Death’s Anniversary
Twenty years ago, and earlier this evening, Beth Batson Wilkerson departed from this life. That which remained was buried and that which persists has moved on. Even now we who remember wonder to where and to when did she go? In the geography of time and space there is no chart on which we can mark her destination but there are places in the heart where shadows tease us with what reason cannot deduce; A place where departed loved ones linger.
I have not been idle these twenty years. Much has changed and, for now, much remains the same. I have a son, now. Like all of us he is curious about his origins and we often talk of how our family was shaped. Beth’s death and our grief is a prominent moment in that story as well as my present happiness. For years I struggled with how to speak of my two great loves: my wife and my late wife. My son seems to grasp this easily. He asks, “Would she like me?” To which I reply, “She would love you!” He states, “I wish she could be here but then we wouldn’t have Mom, would we?” I ponder this as he continues, “But maybe we could just be a bigger family than we are now.” I think, maybe that’s what heaven is, the biggest of all families.
Thus, life as we know it has gone on. I have discharged some responsibilities and, as I have just related, I have taken on new ones. I am not alone and that is how Beth wished it. I live, somehow, both in grief and in joy; Living a paradox founded on an irony.
It is a difficult for me today. I am compelled to accept these truths: I could not have been who I was without one and I would not be who I am without the other. My dreams are never the same and always the same. I can not have what I want and I want to keep what I have. It is as if life is conducted in the vestibule of a great house. All of the loves, the dramas, the moments of grief and ecstasy are lived out in discrete moments of “then” while I am sustained by a sense of waiting for “eventually”.
I imagine heaven as a state of being where our grammar is changed. Every “was” and all our “somedays” are transfigured into “now”. Past and present tense have no context and, deprived of time, they fade as all things mortal must. It is there that we, all of us, gather in the presence of the Almighty. We gather before One whose otherness renders us silent; Our once bountiful sense of time distilled into an everlasting “now”.
Those who have gone before us do not wait for us, we are they who wait restlessly for them. Our Lord said of himself that he is the Alpha and the Omega. In him, we find our First and Last, our Beginning and End.
On a whim... 