At the celebration of Mom’s life last October, I told how she described her days in the weeks and months following Dad’s death. “I opened the curtains, I closed the curtains. I opened the curtains. I closed the curtains.”
I called that the rhythm of her grief. I speculated that any of us who loses a loved one is likely to develop his or her own rhythm. At that point, 2 ½ months after Mom died, I didn’t feel that I had experienced grief. Certainly, there did not seem to be any rhythm to my feelings.
I matched how she described her daily experience with the curtains to how she described her reaction to the death of each of her parents. She said that she had shed few tears but that certain situations would draw from her moments of wistful memory; more history than histrionics, she might say with a chuckle.
That she has a visceral and physical manifestation of grief about Dad is no surprise. They were married for 56 years and had raised three children together. Their presence for each other was daily, for better and for worse. The disappearance of that daily reality was bound to leave a hole in her life for which she needed to find a fill.
Those moments of wistful memory, though, I am coming to see as a form of grief. This is not the numbing form, the kind that blocks the sun in one’s life until it has ebbed. Its ache is more like the twinge of a muscle tweaked by an awkward step, the briefest of heartaches, suddenly there and suddenly gone.
It is a fact, fellow People of a Certain Age, that, as we live on, we will endure more and more such flashes of fleeting sadness, not for the departed but for the growing number of rents in the fabric of our lives.
Such tears can be tiny. I was first mindful of tiny tears when Charles Schulz died. My only connection was that I read Peanuts. More recently, the death of Gwen Ifill affected my humor for a while, so accustomed was I to her presence on the PBS News Hour and Washington Week. The orderliness of my world, caused by the untimely passing of a gifted and dedicated person, had been disturbed ever so slightly by the introduction of a whiff of grief.
When Dad died, we were in the midst of moving to Hawaii. We left even before I had the chance to share with my siblings the act of placing his ashes at the memorial park. My focus from afar was Mom, how she would handle her loss and loneliness. I can’t find anything in my memory, though I loved Dad, that feels like grief over his death. I felt sadness that his life did not turn out as he had hoped, but not grief. I have wondered about that.
And so it seemed was the case after Mom died—no grief—until it wasn’t the case.
Judy and I mark the start of our Christmas music CD playing with the same piece each year, written and sung by Keali’i Reichel. We understand only some of the words as it is sung in Hawaiian. But it is magical in the way it separates not-Christmas from the Christmas season.
For several years, the song has transported us to a rental car parked in the lot of Foothills United Methodist Church in La Mesa. Mom, Chad, Sandee, Judy and I were waiting in the chilly darkness for the choir’s Christmas music show to begin. Nobody spoke as the CD played. It was one of those special moments one shares with loved ones.
When we played the tune this year, I ached for that night in the car in a different way than I had before. It felt like grief.
In her Christmas letter, a friend from college years wrote about her mom, now gone. “She makes us smile when we think of travel, or see a puppy, or go to the beach, or go to the store, or read without enough light, or feed the birds. Those are the small and endearing things that were so central in her life.”
My friend nailed it: “the small and endearing things.” It is drizzling today—Mom would have wanted to know that and how many hundredths of an inch we caught in our rain gauge. She might have told me then about the article she had read in the Yale Divinity School journal she read whenever it came, or talked about the theme of last week’s Lawrence Welk show.
Some days I think I need to share my day yesterday with her in my morning e-mail to her, and then I remember. No big deal, she would say, and she’s right. No big deal. The momentary flash of loss is real, though.
I am lucky. A profound sense of happiness for her and her life nearly always follows the ache and flashes alike, replacing my moments of wistful memory. I expect things to be like this for a long time to come, possibly for the rest of my life; ache—happy thoughts—flash—a smile of joy; a rhythm of grief, perhaps, after all.
Daniel E. White
December 12, 2016