sorrow

On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight worldThat we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree."Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever.

The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.

Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a __oom lens effect,_ in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.

What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I can__ penetrate._people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false-nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality.What am I living on? Someone said the other day, __hat old irrepressible-impossible- hope._ And I thought no, this doesn__ feel like hope. But maybe that__ what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to get better?Hope has to do with continuing, that__ all_I can imagine now, where I couldn__ before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one__ strength, until what__ left is tenuous, transparent.

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms, them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

As a kid I heard the word malignancy as "Malig-Nancy" like an evil woman's name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her.

Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn't have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I'd lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real.

Somehow the thought she might be next wasn't nearly as terrifying as the realization he was gone.

The world was not to be trusted. Loved persons were always stolen. Dreams always squashed. That was life as she understood it.

Uncoupling is a dramatic life event, whose importance is reflected in the eagerness of people to discuss their relationships even years later. Indeed, in attempting to put the story in chronological order, there was no one who was not visited again by sorrow and loss in the telling of it, regardless of the passage of time.

You're gone and you left me. My heart has dissipated. The only thing I can feel is the blood rushing through my veins and the strings that hold my fragile heart together.

Grief came in waves, sometimes big, sometimes small, but even on the calmest days, the grief remained. The tide still came ashore.

I have suffered through enough illnesses, trauma and heartbreak to finally understand that life will keep moving forward inexorably, if terribly at times. I am starting to realize that it can be delightful too, if I let it. My love is not diminished if I let go of sorrow. I almost believe that.

Once, when I was little, I asked her if she__ cried when my father had fallen to his death.At the funeral? I mean, the burial?No, I did not.Because you weren__ sad?Because it was nobody__ business if I was.

A word of consolation may sweetly touch the ear.Now and then a quiet songwill clear the mind of fear.A simple act of kindnesscan ease a load of care.Stories told in memorydiminish all despair.A whispered prayer of comfortdraws angel arms around.Counting blessings, great and small,helps gratitude abound.These acts, all sympathetic,will kindly play their part.But seldom do they dry the tearsshed mutely in the heart.

Love came from all directions. On paper, on screens, in dishes and words and deeds. We__e thinking of you every minute.I__ sorry.We__e sorry.We__e so sorry_

There is the softest of sobbing as the coffin is lowered into the ground, but it is difficult to pinpoint who it is coming from, or if it is instead a collective sound of mingled sighs and wind and shifting feet.