It’s good to be home again. The trip went well, despite waking at 1:45am to the sound of Elijah crying (he was 400 miles away; I must have been dreaming), and again at 6 from a dream in which my husband had called to tell me something awful had happened to him. I think I won’t plan another over-night separation anytime soon. (huband and boy did fine, by the way)

But like I said, the trip went well. It was good to be present, no matter what was said or unsaid, felt or unfelt. Death is such a strange animal. It comes as a sheep to some families—gentle, expected, sweet. To others it’s a wolf, tearing off with something we never imagined it could take. At least not like this, not now. I think it comes with many faces—maybe as many as there are people—and there’s no rule-book on how to deal with each one. How to love the people left behind. How to pick up pieces of broken relationships that don’t have a chance of getting mended anymore—mended in this life, in a tactile, face-to-face way. There are analogies all over this with what it is to face God-concepts dying.

Ultimately we do what we can, loving how we’re able, grieving or standing alongside those who mourn. And this is what makes us human, no?—human in the best sense. That we try. We gather, and we give a go at it, at dealing with whatever animal death has become to us. We gather, hoping that maybe in that act, in our trying, something important will get done, or at least get started. Hoping even if we have no idea what we’re doing, our trying somehow will.

I could be wrong, but it seems like far more often than not, the trying is enough.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Bodies, Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.