Listening for the piano / Thinking about grief

Grief is not a land in which I have travelled much, though I routinely explore it via others’ experience. I am drawn to do this as a student is drawn to the masters: To observe, to sit with, to wonder if those others’ experiences might help prepare me for my own when I find myself in that place.

Will it?

Sara Paretsky, author of the V.I. Warshawski mystery series, says that the grief over her long-time husband’s death hit her like a grand piano falling out of the sky onto her head. There is no pre-mourning, she says.

Nonetheless, I persist in my studies: Memoirs of loss. Stories of grief. Tales of survival.

I sit with those experiences. The words, the feelings, the anguish wash over me.

And I ask myself: Will the sun rise tomorrow? Will I see it when it does? Should I worry about this? Should I just expect, presume that what has always been will always be?

Absurd.

It will not always be.

The loves of my life are all older, are all old. 95, my mother. Almost 80, my partner. 16, my cat.

Life is a circle that spins on, though we all get off at some point. The game is to live, to live fully until that point of departure.

But, I carry the information that life ends, that my loves will die. I carry it like a precious fear that haunts me quietly, softly, and that taints — if I am not careful — the everyday that unfolds, still, today and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Until our time runs out.

I know our time will run out.

Everywhere I look there is death and destruction, illness and sadness. There are endings all around.

And, yes, I see, too, the sun rise, the flowers bloom, the birds sing. But all this lives beside the sun setting, the plants withering, the birds becoming extinct.

Balance: Living is in the yin and the yang. The living and the dying. The sorrow and the joy.

And so.

I carry the fear. I cannot seem to lose it. And I nurture the hope. The hope that when the end comes, it will come softly, gently, timely.

I hope my studies will help me.

And yet.

I hear a noise.

It is a piano falling from the sky.

As I stand.

Waiting for it to land.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash