The deeper the sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Pain is a part of being alive, and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbearable, and we need to be taught that. Sad Soul, take comfort, nor forget that sunrise never failed us yet. After a great pain a formal feeling comes-the verves sit ceremonious, like tombs-the stiff heart questions was it he, that bore, and yesterday, or centuries before? Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow then this light is nearest to all of us. The heart is forever inexperienced. Turn your stumbling blocks into stepping-stones. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach. The same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing...there is sort of an invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting...there are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all...on the rebound one passes into tears and pathos...but the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it-that disgusts me...and no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Feeling is the fuel that takes us from one place to another, through all stages of grief, from the beginning to the moment we realize we need to let grief go. It is present in the mind, spirit, and the body. No matter what we try to anticipate in the grieving process, our emotions may take over unexpectedly. Right now you may feel "deadened" by this experience. But all of your feeling is a confirmation that in the middle of grief and sorrow, you are still very much alive. You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. I’ve been wondering if all the things I’ve seen were ever real were ever really happening. There isn’t any answer. There isn’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer. Basic research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing. What the hell am I doing falling in love with pain again and again and again and again...When things go wrong, don’t go with them. The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. The miserable have no other medicine, but only hope. I’m not afraid to die; I just don’t want to be there when it happens. Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating. Let my hidden weeping arise and blossom. If you are never angry, then you are unborn. I am a rock, I am an island...and an island never cries. Anger is like a thorn in the heart. I won’t hide you in my hands. You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice, my belly, or in my heart...the cure for grief is motion. It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop. There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on the account of one thing always leading to another. Any kind of death is an abrupt interruption to your life. Different circumstances make that death ever more complicated and hard to bear. On to the situation of death, your grief may last longer than you would like it to. Your responses may feel more dramatic than you are prepared to handle. Whether death happens close to home or a million miles away, it can have an equally devastating effect. Even if the situations are beyond your control, however, you have the ability to make things better after the fact. Life is ten percent what happens to us and ninety percent how we deal with it. Life is a fan. Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
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