I’m healthy. My daughter thrives. My marriage is happy. The weather is sunny and mild. We’re not in the middle of a mortgage crisis. We can pay our bills. I have a good social network.
So why have I grown tired, sad, and teary over the course of the day? I was prepared to chide myself for ingratitude, but then I remembered. Tomorrow is an anniversary. It’s been three years, but time doesn’t erase the mark completely. I feel fragile right now. (And my daughter has changed –yet again — these past few days; the cues that used to communicate hunger and exhaustion have changed, she’s eating just about every 90 minutes, and I feel off-kilter in my competence.)
I wrote the following poem a couple of years ago regarding the event.
No Place Too Small
It is easy to know how to meld with so much grief.
With joy there is blindness, rose-colored ignorance,
No body to tend, to anchor one to the earth.
When the world remains intact, you move nimbly,
Caressing the surface of things, noticing little.
But grief burrows in.
It needs only the exposed, wounded soul
To dig in as a tick under skin.
Grief bangs around the cellar, shrieking,
behaves unpredictably, hijacking your eyes
When the store clerk asks how you are. Clutching your
throat when you call the dentist’s office for a cleaning.
You walk now among oblivious humans,
an emotional leper
With lesions rotting your heart.
All of existence has its own death,
It too could slip into a tumor-ridden coma
Adorned with catheter tubes,
And gasp last breaths to the sterile beat
Of a monitor, attended by loved ones.
Since there is no place too small
For grief to infiltrate,
You lie down, surrender, pull it
to every cell of your being.
You take orders, as a dog obeys commands
From an owner; you honor and bear it,
And in this way, endure.
–Kathryn Harper
