Grief

The following is a excerpt from one of my favorite books "The Book of Qualities" by Ruth Gendler. In this book, it personifies many different emotions and virtues. I stumbled across the book today and was flipping through it, looking for a little nugget of script that I might paint on my daughter's wall like "Truth is not willing to live without Love". Instead tonight I found myself drawn to reading this:

Grief

Before she came to this town Grief was a woman named Eliea. She was a potter, and she glazed her big-bellied pots with earth colors until they shone like dull bronze. She had four children. The daughters live inland now in the distant foothills, and the oldest son left the family as soon as he could get away. It was the young boy with the golden curls and the laughing eyes who gave her great joy. He loved the ocean. He was barely walking when he learned to swim and not much older when he started to sail. One day about two years ago the sailors brought his boat home empty.

Never have I heard such sounds of weeping as when Grief found out her son had drowned. She screamed and howled. She stamped her feet and smashed her pots and bowls. She ate with all her fingers. She tore at her hair, and it grew wild and matted. She wandered from place to place with no sense of where she was or how she came there.

One day at the edge of the forest Grief heard another woman crying out. She spoke with her. She listened to her story. Grief was surprised. She had never met anyone else who had suffered as she had. Together the women sat in the clearing and mourned their children. Through the long afternoon, through the twilight, through the night, they wept and wept and wept and wept. In the morning Grief was washed clean of her tears. She came to our town and started to do her real work.




Thank you to everyone who has shared and mourned and wept. I feel like it is time to come out of the forest and once again begin my real work.