In Your Grief – Thoughts on a Sudden Death

Let the flowers die unwatered in their vases.

Flowers?  Yes, they are there.  Someone needed to do something.  Accept them graciously.  Or not.  God knows this is bleak, unchartered territory for you …..

You with this gaping hole, groping around in the dark.  Sleepwalking.  If sleep would only come and the fog dim for a moment’s peace.  But it doesn’t and there is no peace and there is no light and right now you’re not sure how you carry on.  Quite possibly you can’t.  Today.

And the talking heads with their heartfelt pleading platitudes ……

…….. and you remember a poem that you heard, maybe in a movie, and it didn’t make much sense at the time, but it creeps unbidden through the gloom ………stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone ………

And if you could just push through the exhaustion you would move – anywhere but here, dressed in black, with the meaning of  life dead in a box before you.

And I know you feel you’re trapped in an endless nightmare ridden night.  That feeling will remain.  A while.

Perhaps sometime when you’re feeling slightly stronger you’ll open a condolence card.  Perhaps the words will be those of Henry Scott Holland, 1847-1918, Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral :

Death is nothing at all.  I have only slipped away into the next room.  I am I, and you are you.  Whatever we were to each other, that we still are.  Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used.  Put no difference in your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.  Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.  Let my name be ever the household word that it always was, let it be spoken without effort, without the trace of a shadow on it.  Life means all that it ever meant.  It is the same as it ever was; there is unbroken continuity.  Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?  I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner.  All is well.

Perhaps the words will leap from the page and make you cry.  And make you think.

Perhaps sometime you will call him by his old familiar name.

It won’t happen soon.  The process is not quick, but at some unexpected point you will see a wilted flower and gently pour water over it.

But it won’t be now.