(no subject)
No one ever told me that grief felt so much 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. There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I have plenty of what are called “resources”. People get over these things. Come on, I can do this. One is ashamed t o listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red hot memory and all this commonsense vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.
The moments of agony, when I give in to them, are at least clean and honest. It’s all the moments in between I loathe, the wallow and self pity.
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. They say an unhappy man wants distractions, something to take him out of himself. Somebody give me something.
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When I finally broke down and sought him out it was a door slammed in my face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once, and that seeming was as strong as this.
After the death of a friend, about a year ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life, even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about my father. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.
And what about these notes I feel must be put down onto paper? Are they morbid? I lay awake all night with grief, thinking about grief and about lying awake. Part of every misery is 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. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it?
At first I was afraid of going places where we had been happy but once I decided to do it I found it made no difference. His absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It not local at all. The act of living is different all through. His absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
We are setting out on different roads, this cold truth, this terrible traffic regulation, you to the left and me to the right, is just the beginning of the separation. And this separation, I suppose, waits for all. Alone into the alone. Time and space and body were the very things that brought us together, the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn’t the conversation stop? Unless you assume that some other means of communication, utterly different, yet doing the same work, would be immediately substituted. But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old ones? Even nature isn’t such a clown as that. She never plays exactly the same tune twice.
Is anything more certain that that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find his face, his voice, his touch? He died. He is dead. Is it so hard to learn?
I find myself mostly writing about me, thinking about my pain. I should think more of him. His palate was for all the joys of sense and intellect and spirit, all fresh and unspoiled. Nothing would have been wasted on him. He liked more things and liked them more than anyone I have known. His mind was quick and lithe and muscular. Our love was the ideal bond between father and daughter. Solemn and merry, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, mostly as comfortable as putting on your softest slippers. Fate or whatever the fuck it is delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. Beethoven went deaf.
I’m thinking about him always. But already, less than 3 months after his death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make my father into more and more of an imaginary man.
Can I honestly say that I believe he is anything? When I try to I have almost a ghastly sense of unreality, like speaking into a vacuum about a nonentity. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. Apparently the faith, I thought it faith, which has enabled me to pray for all the other souls of the dead had seemed only strong because I never really cared, not desperately, if they existed or not. Yet I thought I did.
But there are other difficulties. WHERE IS HE NOW? That is, in what place is he at the present time. But if he is not a body and the body I loved is no longer he must be in no place at all. What does “now” even mean to the dead? It has been going like this for days. I have questions and thoughts that are not after all very important in relation to grief.
I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the arguments, the love, the sharing, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. The happy past restored. That and just that is what I cry out for, with mad midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air. All that is gone. It is a part of my past and the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death.
They tell me “he is happy now”, they tell me “he is at peace”. What makes them so sure of this? Why are they so sure that all anguish ends with death? Why should the separation which so agonizes the left behind be painless to the departed? “Because he is in God’s hands,” but if so, he was in God’s hands all the time and I have seen what they did to him here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? Why? If gods goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God, for in the only life we know he hurts us beyond our worst dears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then he may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it. Sometime people also tell me God forgave God. But if the faith is true, he didn’t. He crucified him.
What do I gain be evasions? Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. But I would have truth at any price. What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers my mother and me offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes merely raised by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced on us, false diagnosies, fits of sobriety, and one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Is it rational to believe in a bad god? It is true we have his threats and promises but why should we believe them? If cruelty is from his point of view good, telling lies may be good too. Even if they were true, what then? If his ideas of good are so very different from ours, what he calls heaven might well be what we should call hell. Finally if reality is at its very root so meaningless to us or if we are such imbeciles, what is the point of trying to think either about god or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you pull it tight.
Aren’t all these notes just the writings of a woman who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.
And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting, just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
It is not true I’m always thinking about my dad. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I’m not are no worse. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. What’s wrong with the world to make is so flat, shabby, worn out looking? Then I remember. Feelings and feelings and feelings.
What do people mean when they say “I am not afraid of God because I know he is good?” Have they never been to a dentist?
I can understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had Dad for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and I have to lay the bow down.
It was too perfect to last. It had reached its proper perfection. It had become what it had in it to be. Therefore it would not be prolonged. I could believe any of this. And I try. I turn to him as often as possible in gladness. I even salute him with a laugh. The less I mourn him the nearer I seem to him.
But tonight the hells of young grief have opened again, the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare reality, the wallowed in tears. For in grief, nothing stays put. One keeps on emerging from a phase but it always recurs. Am I going in circles or is it a spiral?
And if it is a spiral, am I going up or down? And how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say ‘I never realized my loss till this moment.’ The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. They say the coward dies many times, so does the beloved.
I thought I could describe a state, make a map of sorrow. Sorrow however turns out to be not a state but a process; it needs not a map but a history. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape, as I’ve already noted, not every bend does, Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one, you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. This is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench.
Will he ever know how much he took away with him when he left? He has stripped me even of my past, even of things we never shared.
There is no end to this. I like to think of him as thunder and lightning, powerful and beautiful and part of the atmosphere. He went, he is gone, onto the eternal fountain.
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. There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I have plenty of what are called “resources”. People get over these things. Come on, I can do this. One is ashamed t o listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red hot memory and all this commonsense vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.
The moments of agony, when I give in to them, are at least clean and honest. It’s all the moments in between I loathe, the wallow and self pity.
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. They say an unhappy man wants distractions, something to take him out of himself. Somebody give me something.
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When I finally broke down and sought him out it was a door slammed in my face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once, and that seeming was as strong as this.
After the death of a friend, about a year ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life, even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about my father. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.
And what about these notes I feel must be put down onto paper? Are they morbid? I lay awake all night with grief, thinking about grief and about lying awake. Part of every misery is 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. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it?
At first I was afraid of going places where we had been happy but once I decided to do it I found it made no difference. His absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It not local at all. The act of living is different all through. His absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
We are setting out on different roads, this cold truth, this terrible traffic regulation, you to the left and me to the right, is just the beginning of the separation. And this separation, I suppose, waits for all. Alone into the alone. Time and space and body were the very things that brought us together, the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn’t the conversation stop? Unless you assume that some other means of communication, utterly different, yet doing the same work, would be immediately substituted. But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old ones? Even nature isn’t such a clown as that. She never plays exactly the same tune twice.
Is anything more certain that that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find his face, his voice, his touch? He died. He is dead. Is it so hard to learn?
I find myself mostly writing about me, thinking about my pain. I should think more of him. His palate was for all the joys of sense and intellect and spirit, all fresh and unspoiled. Nothing would have been wasted on him. He liked more things and liked them more than anyone I have known. His mind was quick and lithe and muscular. Our love was the ideal bond between father and daughter. Solemn and merry, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, mostly as comfortable as putting on your softest slippers. Fate or whatever the fuck it is delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. Beethoven went deaf.
I’m thinking about him always. But already, less than 3 months after his death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make my father into more and more of an imaginary man.
Can I honestly say that I believe he is anything? When I try to I have almost a ghastly sense of unreality, like speaking into a vacuum about a nonentity. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. Apparently the faith, I thought it faith, which has enabled me to pray for all the other souls of the dead had seemed only strong because I never really cared, not desperately, if they existed or not. Yet I thought I did.
But there are other difficulties. WHERE IS HE NOW? That is, in what place is he at the present time. But if he is not a body and the body I loved is no longer he must be in no place at all. What does “now” even mean to the dead? It has been going like this for days. I have questions and thoughts that are not after all very important in relation to grief.
I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the arguments, the love, the sharing, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. The happy past restored. That and just that is what I cry out for, with mad midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air. All that is gone. It is a part of my past and the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death.
They tell me “he is happy now”, they tell me “he is at peace”. What makes them so sure of this? Why are they so sure that all anguish ends with death? Why should the separation which so agonizes the left behind be painless to the departed? “Because he is in God’s hands,” but if so, he was in God’s hands all the time and I have seen what they did to him here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? Why? If gods goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God, for in the only life we know he hurts us beyond our worst dears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then he may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it. Sometime people also tell me God forgave God. But if the faith is true, he didn’t. He crucified him.
What do I gain be evasions? Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. But I would have truth at any price. What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers my mother and me offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes merely raised by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced on us, false diagnosies, fits of sobriety, and one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Is it rational to believe in a bad god? It is true we have his threats and promises but why should we believe them? If cruelty is from his point of view good, telling lies may be good too. Even if they were true, what then? If his ideas of good are so very different from ours, what he calls heaven might well be what we should call hell. Finally if reality is at its very root so meaningless to us or if we are such imbeciles, what is the point of trying to think either about god or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you pull it tight.
Aren’t all these notes just the writings of a woman who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.
And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting, just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
It is not true I’m always thinking about my dad. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I’m not are no worse. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. What’s wrong with the world to make is so flat, shabby, worn out looking? Then I remember. Feelings and feelings and feelings.
What do people mean when they say “I am not afraid of God because I know he is good?” Have they never been to a dentist?
I can understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had Dad for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and I have to lay the bow down.
It was too perfect to last. It had reached its proper perfection. It had become what it had in it to be. Therefore it would not be prolonged. I could believe any of this. And I try. I turn to him as often as possible in gladness. I even salute him with a laugh. The less I mourn him the nearer I seem to him.
But tonight the hells of young grief have opened again, the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare reality, the wallowed in tears. For in grief, nothing stays put. One keeps on emerging from a phase but it always recurs. Am I going in circles or is it a spiral?
And if it is a spiral, am I going up or down? And how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say ‘I never realized my loss till this moment.’ The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. They say the coward dies many times, so does the beloved.
I thought I could describe a state, make a map of sorrow. Sorrow however turns out to be not a state but a process; it needs not a map but a history. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape, as I’ve already noted, not every bend does, Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one, you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. This is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench.
Will he ever know how much he took away with him when he left? He has stripped me even of my past, even of things we never shared.
There is no end to this. I like to think of him as thunder and lightning, powerful and beautiful and part of the atmosphere. He went, he is gone, onto the eternal fountain.