Veil

There are times in life you can prepare for the road ahead, and times when you wake up standing waist high in a pool of water.  Shapeless and thick, grief coats our brain and body with a black film impossible to cleanse.  It lingers.  And drowns.  Then suddenly disappears.  Only to strike again when you are boiling water for tea or jotting down notes for the grocery store.

There are some flashes of grief that will never go away.  Permanently etched – a dear friend in college who lost her grandmother, body bent over suitcase, tears quietly carving lines in skin.  My grandfather, wheelchair bound, gray suit and pale eyes, the front row of his wife’s funeral.  The stillness of my grandmother’s kitchen after she passed away.

The only thing I have pinpointed about grief is that children, mostly, are immune.  They feel loss, and their eyes can mirror sorrow, but they keep onward.  Between scoops of mac-n-cheese, "Mommy, why did Great Granpa have to go to heaven?" Again while brushing her teeth.  Yet again while stooping to pick dry cereal off the floor.  She plays it on repeat, revealing her song sparingly… while searching for a book under her bed, or drawing a kitten with a heart-shaped mouth.  But her world never really changes, bouts of grief scattering quickly like sparrows in the sky.

We all loose souls, it's part of living.  Last week, we lost my grandfather.  Sometimes there aren’t words to express the love or memories, just earthly aggravation with the death that consumes.  Emotionally, spiritually, I bow to death’s heavenly promise, but I cannot help be frustrated by its thinness.  Translucence.  Like a summer screen veiling one world from the next.  Today I am covered in mesh marks from pressing endlessly.   Missing.  And wanting to see in.