Thoughts on grief.

I have thought of the sticky feeling I had all winter after Grandpa died. It wasn’t hopelessness, although I felt little in the way of hope, everything just seemed to clog and stick to my bones. Futility in the mundane, a passive sadness at the lack of support from what felt like anyone. Oblivious to helping hands, dismissive often of the possibility that things could be different. Dad handed me Grandpa’s pocket knife across the table of a fancy restaurant. I had a whiskey sour in my other hand. His ceremonious passing of this gift, this thing that had ridden around in Grandpa’s pocket for so many years, sliced so many apples from his own orchard and doubtless opened an envelope or two - the job that didn’t fit, the boy that fit even less, the mattress in the boot of my car - these things that stuck I could perhaps severe now, I thought.

The knife has sat in my middle drawer under a toiletry bag full of soap and sun cream since I moved here in mid November. Some things stuck, but obliviousness did not. The pain of possibility seared the back of me all winter, gripping like a rough mother cat with her young - it would not let me out of its sight. It churned and prodded until I found that I had looked at it one day. There it was, the confronting reality of choice - life, or death. Life, or this subliminal state of breathing, sleeping consciousness.

An acceptance of death, I realise, is life. It is not to mimic or sympathise with death itself. To see the gifts, the medicine of death, is to respect it with life.