The Grief of it All

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.

Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.

Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.”

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“Grief is love's souvenir. It's our proof that we once loved. Grief is

the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love

was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.”

Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior: A Memoir

Born into grief

The mother’s scars,

The father’s unconscious betrayal,

The olive-skinned boy,

Too dark for the taste of the British racist teachers

Questioning too much,

Refusing to obey authority immediately,

A sense of the tragic already then

Permeates his being.

This inheritance of grief,

Born a mere 5 years after the tremendum

Those night panics,

The fear of death so early

A feeling that my life had already accordioned

And I was sensing my impending demise.

This sense of the tragic quality of life,

That fuels the very core of the universe,

That the divine catastrophe that was creation

(The Lurianic “breaking of the vessels”)

Affected every holographic particle,

Infected every heart (chalal hapanui)

Resulting in that the sum total of all human suffering.

My early horror seeing human suffering,

The amputee veteran opening the doors of Harrods,

And man’s inhumanity to man, so close.

My melted soul when facing the tears of another

My ability to question god and his justice,

So early

Now haunts my very interpretation of texts, history and culture.

It is as if

I cannot escape this globalizing tendency

Despite post-modern critique

Knowing full well that history is in the details

Having philosophically relinquished overarching thematics and trajectories

(Knowing that doctrine and ideology and historiography led to Auschwitz)

I still move in those drives to make meaning over the meaningless.

As if I feel that I cannot settle for the mundane and the particular

I search for the delusion of a Frankl universe, this elusive search for meaning,

The Father figure, who will make sense of it all finally,

The relief that the god-image might provide.

The sense of acceleration of time informs the tragic,

As if

My life’s path has so little time left

So much to still accomplish

And

Faced with my failures

And mediocrity

I hang suspended in this space of frustration.

Peculiar how grief rears its head

In the most unexpected places

In the moment of lovemaking

I am overcome with grief,

In the beauty of a pastoral landscape

It overwhelms me,

In holding my darling grandchildren

Their tiny heads in the nape of my neck,

Or my son resting on my chest on a Chesapeake Bay yacht

Under the stars, my heart melts in grief.

Anticipatory grief

Of things as yet to unfold

Of losing loved ones,

As yet to leave this world

Each parting a possible last.

Of body parts no longer functioning

And anticipating what is yet to afflict,

Of faculties, no longer able to sense

The beauty and mystery of music and a sunset.

Bathed in these tears,

I face the future

Drowning in grief

(It does not release me)

the little boy inside continues to be heard

pulling me to the deep,

inside the heart of darkness.