(This is fiction. Ah well, fiction is just a cover, you might say, a reality in disguise, sometimes dressed up to make your heart soar and sometimes too stripped and stark as to scare and leave you with that sinking feeling)

Stricken with grief, it feels like the world has deserted me, no matter how much I am surrounded by people. All sweet promises and assurances mean little. I suddenly feel adrift in choppy, uncharted waters. I wrestle with myself to stay calm and anchored. Against the sudden waves that rise, my will seems helpless to ride them. I feel the upheaval and for a while am out of control. Life’s forces leave me wobbling for a bit, weepy and afraid. Is surrender the way, or resistance? Am I just drenched, or do I risk drowning?

Other times, my grief is a blaze that consumes me and cannot perceive or receive any warmth as salve or succour.

I fail to recognise, in my state of dislocation, that the very things that can help me heal are what I hold at bay. Grief is seductive too? A state where I feel intensely but can claim to be comfortably numb. A respite from the unforgiving demands of daily existence, of responsibility, of action and consequence.

The cocktail of loss and grief spews as anger. Some of the sadness is mine as I experience loss and a void, and some of it is what I hold as a proxy on behalf of the departed. I conjure all manner of slights, hurts and injustices that the deceased has suffered at the hands of people, named and unnamed.

I condemn myself and accuse others. I lash out. I deliver a guilty verdict upon myself and others for all that led to my loss. In this I am the prosecutor and the judge. My lens allows for no other view. My reality is the only reality. And that is final.

I hurt so much that it the only thing I am capable of offering others. I choose words that pierce, draw blood, open old wounds and create new ones. People gasp, shocked and pained, and I say, ‘There, now you know!’, and thus, for a while I believe others and I inhabit a familiar shared space in which my spurts of grief, the uncontrolled fury, and unedited utterances needs no justification or permission. No awkwardness and graces. To those who say, ‘Poor thing. Overcome with grief’, I say, ‘**** you. I have lost. Have you? Show me. Do you feel as much? Prove it’.

For a while I feel I held the key to halt the clock and even reverse it, block the reach of Fate’s hand and even bend it to my will. Except, that in that fatal moment, without my knowing, willing or permission, a life was snatched away. Could I have been more vigilant? What did I miss? Of what avail, all the carefully constructed walls and defences, the fortification and the watch? Couldn’t that moment have been the miracle that underlined my faith forever?

Alas!

As days go by, I see and hear you in the people whose lives you touched. I see you in the things around the house whose addition you played a part in. A bit calmer and more curious now, listening to others with whom you shared much, and for whom you lost sleep or shed a tear, I discover that you were much more than who I knew you to be.

My illusions begin to peel away. I was precious to you but not the whole universe. I thought I held the keys to your lock. But you had strewn the clues all over among your circle, and here I am now puzzling over them, with each day’s fresh conversation about a past yielding insights about who you were and your state of being over time, an unlocking quite unexpected, infuriating and heart-warming at the same time.

I see that a reconstruction of a shared past is inevitable. I now look forward to it. In this, a more realistic appraisal of what was possible begins, gripes lose their edge, fondness grows, forgiveness follows. I might hopefully see the ways in which I, with all my good intentions, may have tried to aggressively combat the disease, when offering comfort was the better option, and how, out of ignorance and anxiety, I thought you were non-cooperative when actually, in your condition you couldn’t do what I asked you to.

When I stop blaming you, I free myself too.

I will soon be hearing people say that I should pick myself up. After all the work with myself, I should probably weigh less, feel more like the breeze rather than a fallen tree or a raging storm. Hopefully by then I will know where I am headed. No, actually I am not sure that it is important to know. Maybe I will go where the winds take me.  I don’t know what lies in store. But hey, who does?