Bereave

Only a tiny part of this grief is my grief. This grief belongs to her children, her brother and sister, her multitudinous friends, her grandchildren - both those who saw her often, who were watched daily by her as infants, who were picked up from school by her three times a week as recently as last month; and those others who will have missed almost all of her, whose memories will be entirely or mostly limited to photographs of themselves as toddlers and young children with a woman whose light shone out so brightly that it cannot be dimmed.

I'm sitting in her kitchen, drinking her tea.

We are in that no-man's-land before the funeral. That time considerately orchestrated by society where there are things the bereaved must do, things to be organized and decided and planned, whereby the people who deal in death - the funeral home, the priests, the lawyers - tell you what you must do, and you obediently go and do it. And with every phone call that must be made and every repetition of the unconscionable news that she has died, you come to believe it a tiny bit more, though it cuts like a dull knife every time. But it leaves mercifully little time to sit and dwell, so you cry in the car on the way, and wipe your tears away when you arrive.

It is not my grief, mostly; so I observe, and help where I can, and stay quiet and keep the children amused, or fed, or clothed, as appropriate.

I am so glad that my husband has brothers and sisters to do this hard thing with. The day will come, inevitably, when I have to do it alone. (Although the alternative, it not coming, would be worse; for that would mean that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.)

We are finding things to be thankful for. We are hearing lovely stories, and learning things we never knew, and everyone wants to help and it's good to accept it. My sister-in-law says thanking people is good karma, and she will be well stocked with it when she has acknowledged every message of kindness she has received.

We will come out the other side, eventually.