Last week, Dem in the Heart of Texas discussed the permanence of grief and some of the curious ways such permanence manifests itself in the way forward. I didn’t have a chance to read or comment on her diary until this morning and the cannonball shot that came at me was that a residual of that permanence can be the trace of betrayal you feel when a loved one or friend has died.
 | The wind of death that softly blows
The last warm petal from the rose,
The last dry leaf from off the tree,
To-night has come to breathe on me.
|
Betrayal is such a harsh word. It can generate all kinds of nasty feelings of anger and denial and a kind of self-reduction, a loss of self even, perhaps a deflation of self. When you feel betrayed by anyone or anything, the instinctive gut reaction might be a kind of wretching of the soul. How can you be so hurt? How could you leave yourself open to such pain? How could they do that to me?
It’s not a comfortable or logical reaction at all. When you are betrayed by anything, that act perceived as against you creates a primal and elemental internal reaction. Our logical selves grab this gut feeling and rationalize it as grief mixed with depression, mixed with anxiety, mixed with fear – all the emotions that one naturally feels when someone or something has died that we had a connection to. We acknowledge anger as one of the natural steps of grief. I think there is often an additional shadowing of betrayal that moves beyond anger. Perhaps it is the unacknowledged bitter aftertaste left once anger has subsided. Perhaps the bitterness mellows with time.
We all function rather like trapeze artists, swinging from a high wire made of decisions, and actions, and crises, and joys of our daily lives. Our circus act evolves throughout our lives, the faces of our fellows shift and change as we swing towards them and away, and back again to grasp their hands and if we are skillful, somersault with ease in the atmosphere. The net stretches thankfully below; it is a net woven invisibly by our family, our friends, our co-workers, the guy at the post office who sells the stamps, the woman at the deli who’s been there for years and who knows you like curried chicken salad. The neighbor who has your extra house key. Our net is a freefall connection to this world. Its existence places us spatially – we are oriented in the here and now by who we are connected to. And each of us has a net, whether we’ve identified it or not. A place to fall is critically important to us – more than we often realize.
There was a time I learned to hate,
As weaker mortals learn to love;
The passion held me fixed as fate,
Burned in my veins early and late,
But now a wind falls from above—
Imagine those ties that extend from us to those beside us within the nexus of things we love or place value in and people and animals and places and experiences we cherish. Consider our likes and our loves as a field of stars in the sky, webbed across the dark: such stars blink in our lives. Our interactions within our personal nexus nourish those connecting threads between each point, each star in our web.
And then a connecting point fades or dies. A tie, a string suddenly languishes without connection. There is a hole in our net; the sky dims a bit.
Then it dims again.
It is such a secret place, the land of tears.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
There is a hole that seems like it cannot be filled. There are words that will never be said the first time, for the last time. There are looks that will not be shared. There is no reason to be angry anymore, to hate anymore, to argue anymore. No reason to buy that porcelain elephant for Christmas as a gift. No reason to look at ties in the men’s department. You feel a thread dangling now, from your heart, from your mind. There is no tug on the other end, no tightening of the binding tie.
And once, but once at Love’s dear feet,
I yield strength, and life, and heart;
His look turned bitter into sweet,
His smile made all the world complete;
The wind blows loves like leaves apart—
There are no more years to grow. To grow older. To grow up. To grow more lovely, more handsome, more funny, more profound. Older. No more eyes to see a new grandchild, a hand to smooth the furrows from your worried forehead. Where are the arms in whose circle you stood, the embrace that told you of love?
The wind of death that tenderly
Is blowing ’twixt my love and me.
There is reason to grieve and there is reason to understand that, yes, it is a betrayal. But it is life that brings us to this and life that takes us forward. We trapeze artists have amazing resilience. The bars swing above the high wire and we balance each other as we move to the next ring. The net grows smaller; it is in need of repair.
We learn, as we practice this art of life, to pinpoint our landings. At least I think we do. We can.
O wind of death, that darkly blows
Each separate ship of human woes
Far out on a mysterious sea,
I turn, I turn my face to thee.
excerpted lines from The Wind of Death - Ethelwyn Wetherald
As always, a link to previous diaries in The Grieving Room
