If you leave me, can I come too - and other impossible requests.

In ‘A Grief Observed’, C.S. Lewis starts by saying he didn’t know grief felt so much like fear. My experience is that it feels like a range of things. One of its manifestations feels like something very destructive – a daisy-cutter bomb, for instance – tearing you apart inside, and all you want to do is howl in anguish. But of course you just have to keep going on, and on … you may have fantasies of what would happen if you suddenly stood in the street and wailed at the top of your voice, but you don’t do it. Sometimes it hits so hard I almost stagger with the physicality of the pain.Ritorna me - come back to me – hoki mai ra – I’m sure every language includes that phrase. Lewis also said that it was the worst kind of selfishness to ask the dead to return. I’m guilty of it, then – just one day, one hour, ten minutes – come back, or take me with you – just don’t leave me here without you. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff says to Cathy after she dies, ‘Do not leave me here in this abyss, where I cannot find you!’ The idea that the dead stay dead and gone is quite a recent one. As one of my colleagues, who happens to be an Anglican priest, said to me, ‘Requiescat in Pace (rest in peace) on a tombstone was not always just a pious hope – until recently it was more of an instruction to the recently departed.’Then why can I not find him? Can it really be that all I am to have of him, forever, of my only love, is the box of ashes still sitting on the top shelf of my closet? He was the least peaceful of men – he didn’t even sleep peacefully – how can he now be somewhere resting eternally? Does he see me now? If one believes in Heaven – and I do – then he is supposed to be happy for eternity. Could he see me here, see how my heart is broken, and be eternally happy just the same?
Labels: grief, loss of loved one, widow
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by Sempre
3/19/07
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