DEAREST FRIEND - OUR GRIEF IS DIFFERENT
We are all filled with grief - but our grief is not the same.The basis on which your friendship with him existed is not the same as mine or anyone else's - it's so very personal.
Things you harbor in your heart that bring you joy and pain are based upon your experience, the words, the thoughts and deeds exchanged while you and he walked through life in fields that overlapped.
I can see your relationship, two of you engaged in animated conversation expressed with great emotion, sometimes laughter, sometimes strife, sometimes serious about work and life, of play and fun, of hopes and dreams of plans and schemes, of memories and fears shared - -
- as if enclosed - wrapped in cellophane - in a world owned by two of you alone, a world I could often view, but not hear, see but not be a part.
That's how it is with a friend, a very close intimate thing, a singular world of two, a touching of the spirit, a sharing of time, an interchange of humanity leaving engravings permanently on your souls, your hearts, your experiences - a recorded history.
So now he is gone.
A grave emptiness is within your being - a vacuum where friendship was and silence is where voices rang out with familiarity.
There is a tide of sorrow that rises and falls with the slightest disturbance and sometimes spills out through the eyes and voice and forces silent screams from the lips.
A pain like no other,
it will not be quieted except by one footstep after the other, going on, working, living, remembering, each echo ever so slightly less than the one before it.
There is no salve, no compound, no pill, no massage, no ice, no heat, nothing to take away the pain, indeed, do we want the pain to go away?
We want only our loved one to return and make all this right, a chance to say goodbye, a chance to challenge the decision, a chance to force a cure, a chance to make a change, a chance - a chance - any chance!
No chance.
Just emptiness and hollowness and groaning that is your own, wailing, like the wolf, into the sky, into the night, long, lonesome, endless.
This pain is not what should be remembered. It is the laughter, the chatter, the song you liked, the way you spoke on the phone, the jobs you did, the jobs you got out of, the cut of the cards, the tick of the minutes of life.
It is a highly personal grief, ultimately intimate, exchanging of parts of yourselves with each other, of mind, of personality, of being.
No one can know that grief that surges inside of you, born of life, of love and of experience shared.
It is your own. No one will ever comprehend that part of you.
Others may grieve, but not as you grieve.
I thank you for your love and friendship for my beloved son.
~ Mike's Mom ~ Copyright ©2000 by
Doris S. Jamison
All Rights Reserved
