June 2013
48 posts
One Cent
There is someone else’s pennies
On my floor and contact lenses
In my trash bin and crumpled
Ticket stubs next to my bed.
My hands do not want to throw
Them away because hell,
Humanity in its smallest form
Deserves to be behind glass,
Not in a landfill.
I do not want to say humans
Can be reduced to the pennies
They carelessly throw onto the
Street, but I’m not saying
They can’t be.
June 10, 2013.
“Malignant.”
There’s something about that word. Without fail, that word drives a stake through hope. You say that word to someone and you watch as the light leaves their eyes and their face falls. It provokes helplessness, rage, anguish, loss, speechlessness.
I was having a completely ordinary day up until I heard that one word.
All too often, as I learned today, this word is followed by another.
“Terminal.”
“Sorrow found me when I was young. Sorrow waited, sorrow won.”
—
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment. Will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference of grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
— Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking
