Dear Reader,
Yesterday I texted an old friend and mentor in San Francisco, a person who has been dear to me, who has guided me through the spiritual wilderness into which I will occasionally wander in moments of loss or grief or fear.
I texted him to get in touch, no big thing, it’s been a while, I’ve been living in Italy for over four years now, and the reply was, “Is this Carey?” I texted “yes,” ignoring the misspelling although finding it odd. Then the reply came. It was his wife responding. She told me that he had gotten cancer a few months ago and died on Christmas Day.
Now this morning I feel the heaviness, the difficulty concentrating, the old fear.
When I wrote the column five days a week I would sometimes fear that I had hit my limit, that I would never write another column.
Eventually it would pass and I would write the column.
This morning I felt that but something else too, a heaviness in the chest and I thought: This isn’t just a writing issue. This is grief. Not just grief for my friend, but grief for everyone. A global grief.
Maybe grief is sweeping the planet, as death is sweeping the planet. What if we are all grieving already but haven’t realized it yet?
Grief comes too soon. It catches us off guard. Even when we know it’s coming, we have no defense. It demands to be felt.
So what does that imply, and what can we do, if we are collectively, globally, experiencing grief without quite recognizing it yet?
Writing this column for twelve years taught me certain things. One is that grief is bigger and stronger and longer-lasting than one expects. When one thinks one should be done with grief, one may be just beginning. There’s wisdom in carrying the burden, slowing down when you have to, feeling the weight of it.
We tend to think that once we know what we’ve got, we can go ahead and cure it.
All the more shock when grief lays its heavy burden on our doorstep and we cannot even open the door then, the burden, the burlap bag of heavy horrors will not budge and we cannot climb out the window. Our house has been shut up by this rough and heavy loss, someone has come in the night and laid it on our doorstep and the door now will not open so we are stuck in the house. As we are all stuck in our houses. Our confinement becomes penance.
It would be unseemly to dance in the sunshine while the dead pile up. Only children are allowed to draw rainbows; the rest of us must wear masks over downturned mouths and walk the streets silently without acknowledging each other, to magnify our grief and penance.
Or that is how it seems today.
I’m just saying: It’s possible that while we think we are at the beginning of something, in fact we are already mourning.
