Two Years

29 April 2019... the two year anniversary of the passing of my dear Mother.  If you want to know about this near-perfect human, HERE is something to look at and read over.

This day has been looming over me for weeks... I've watched it steadily creeping its way closer and closer; promising to bring untold pain and gloom.  Now that it's arrived, I'm going to look it in the face and see what some honest thought can do. 

I'm probably not much different than anyone else who has lost their mom.  At least anyone who had a really good, close relationship with their mom.  For that relationship alone, anyone should feel blessed... because there are many people who either never know their mother, or who do not have anything like a good relationship with the mother they do know.

So... there's that.  

Now, why does a grown man feel so damn small and weak whenever he remembers losing his mom?  I guess for me it's because I never, really never, allowed myself to imagine that she might actually die someday.  I was horrified that it really occurred... and that is not a fully sane reaction.   Did I really think she would live forever?  (Spoiler: she will, just not the way she was.)

If I'm honest, I guess the truth is she is the person I needed... all my life.  I allowed myself to rely on her existence and came to use it as a lifeline, so to speak, to my own.  Not sure if this is explaining properly what I'm trying to convey... oh, well.

Whenever things were tough, she was there to tell the adult version of this little boy “It’s okay….”  And he always believed her—but only because she was HERE.  That, of course, is no longer the case.    

Rather than go on and on here with my pathetic attempts at explaining my sense of loss, I'll stand on the shoulders of a giant and let him help.  Here follow several excerpts from the amazing work, "A Grief Observed."

C.S. Lewis understood...

“The act of living (without her) is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

“But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child.” 

“It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is that word really so difficult to learn?” 

“They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?” 

“Fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it.  Beethoven went deaf.” 

“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.” 

“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

"People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them." 

“...there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs—nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time—but the atmosphere, the taste, the whole thing is deadly. So with this.” 

“...for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.” 

“And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job--where the machine seems to run on much as usual--I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.” 

“I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.” 

“Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.” 

“Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present, I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.” 

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”  

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”

“Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?"

“The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.” 

“I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in.” 

“I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them.” 

--C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Enough for this year.  The day will soon lose its power over me and I'll keep watch for the next one.  

I love you, Momma... and I miss you more ... and love you more...

-kmg