GRIEF

"What we have once enjoyed, we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us" — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I grew until I was six years old living on Gore Avenue in Webster Groves, Missouri. We lived in a little two story house with a basement right next door to my Aunt Clara and Uncle Eli who lived in a very similar house. Eli was my father’s uncle really. The last surviving brother of my Dad’s father, Joseph, who died before I was born when my Dad was just 20 years old. Eli was a big man, tall, broad shouldered, with a face like Rushmore. He wore wire rimmed glasses and was extraordinarily gentle and kind. I don’t know how I knew that at four or five years old but being held by him, or even just greeted by him felt like being loved the way I think of love now: safe, surprised, laughing, fun, funny, easy and as natural as breathing. Eli was great. And he was right next door. Aunt Clara was pretty great, too. They had two adopted kids who were both out of the house and gone by the time I came along so my brother, Roy, and I filled something in for them. When I fell off our front porch after smacking the kid up the street over the head with my cap gun and running home with my gang laughing all the way I landed on my head on a nail imbedded in the concrete walk below the porch. It bled like crazy as head wounds often do. I was probably out for a while but when I woke up Clara was sitting on the ground, holding me in her lap, a towel pressed over the wound. She was cooing gently to me that everything was alright and every few minutes she would lift the towel and swab out the open wound to get dirt and gravel out of it. Even though I knew instantly that the fall and the head wound were some kind of karmic retribution for having smacked that annoying kid with my cap gun I was in some kind of heaven lying in Clara’s lap being nursed by her, loved by her, cared for forever by her, and still alive. Growing up next to Aunt Clara and Uncle Eli, with friends up and down the block, even the annoying kid, a red dog and a brother was the real deal, as good as it gets. Probably that same year, when I was five or six, Eli fell over dead in their basement of a heart attack. I had been in that basement with Eli looking for things we could play with so all I could picture of his death was him lying on the cold concrete floor next to the slop sink with maybe a little blood coming from his head up above his right eye from hitting his head when he fell. What is death to a five year old except as it accumulates through time when the dead person is no longer there to pick you up, laughing and smiling through his glasses, in his huge hands? The next weekend we all dressed up and went to the funeral home down on the main street, across from the Congregational Church, and sat while someone talked about how much we would all miss Uncle Eli. None of it made any sense to me but I was surrounded by people who loved each other as best they could and I felt safe. When the service was over we walked in a line out of the big room and into a smaller one on our way outside. There was an open coffin in the smaller room and my father, walking behind me, swooped me up in his huge hands and lifted me up and over the coffin so that I could see Uncle Eli for the last time. Of course I didn’t know that it was the last time but I wasn’t an idiot and when I saw that beautiful rugged face all smoothed and and soft and gentle, with his glasses on and that thin lipped smile that was a bit sardonic, looking exactly like my dear Uncle Eli, but it wasn’t him. No longer was the laughter and the joy there in his eyes, no longer did he smile when he recognized me, no longer was he the real Uncle Eli. At that moment something clicked in me about death and the loss it brings with it. It didn’t click intellectually but hanging in the air over Eli, in my father’s strong hands, like an angel in a Renaissance painting, something moved in me and whatever moved made life feel more temporary, more fragile, more precious, and more dear than it had before. I think I began to know something about loss at that moment. But when Dad set me down and we walked out the front door holding hands into the afternoon sunshine we just moved on. Home, eventually, after the adults talked in the sun across from the church for awhile. Changed out of the good clothes into play clothes and went out to play in the neighborhood until it was time for supper. I don’t remember any conversations about death, or about Eli. I remember overhearing pieces of conversations about Clara and what would happen to her. She eventually went into a home and died a few years later. We would go to visit her, but she was smaller, quieter, there was less of her without Eli to think about and to love, and in some mysterious way she was further away from me now. Perhaps I held her away because I didn’t want to feel the loss that I had felt but not understood when Eli died.

For reasons that now seem to me to be crazy, white Anglo-Saxon protestants don’t mourn in public, don’t grieve out loud, don’t sing and dance, keen and cry, get drunk for a week or rend their garments. We quietly carry the grief around for a lifetime, tapping down the raw emotion, telling stories about the good old days; we sit around the big mahogany table with one less chair at Thanksgiving but we never talk about it, never say how much we miss that person, or question where that person is now, what they are doing now, whether they can see me in their mind’s eye the way I can always see them holding me up in the air so that I look down into love and their magnificent smiling face. We carry it with us forever, never resolved, never ending. But death has no end, does it? Death goes on forever. Life ends for everyone but death is eternity. Other cultures make a big deal of death and of mourning. There are ceremonies and rituals and traditions and to a Wasp nerd like myself those celebrations can seem overbearing and embarrassing, but boy, do I long for memories of real deep emotional celebrations of life. I have a lot of good memories of Eli and the many, many people that I have been close to that died since that early one when I was five. We start experiencing loss as soon as we are pushed and pulled out of the womb and it just keeps going. Aunts, uncles, mothers, brothers, lovers, friends, colleagues, fathers, sons and daughters for some, old friends we haven’t seen in years, a neighbor down the block who always waved when we walked past with the dog, that same neighbor’s dog a few weeks later. Death follows us and precedes us as long as we live. I want to learn how to embrace it, how to run out to meet it, I want to learn how to love it, laugh with it, and not ignore it, not push it aside, not tap it down inside. Anything that is as present in our lives as loss and death we ought to learn how to love. Otherwise we are just fighting nature, trying to rise above reality into fantasy and there is no air to breathe in space, in that space beyond reality. Life is for loving and you can’t know life without knowing loss and grieving can be a song and a dance and a story we tell to help us get to sleep at night.