Of course it’s possible to grieve for places and things. Not just people and animals. Or for ways of life longed for, but never obtained due to the vagaries of life, chance, happenstance, or fate. Or for connections lost; not to death or disease, but to time gone untended, a garden of heirloom flowers gone to seed.
 | Welcome - this is a weekly forum (with rotating hosts) for whoever happens by and wants to discuss issues relating to grief, death, loss, or impending loss. Share your story, or read and cry - use it for what it's worth to you. Giving it a Rec each week will help keep it visible for those who may need it - thanks. |
There are those who think they can control their destinies and power on towards a future that they have designed. Perhaps they may be right. I’ve not ever been one of those who have been able to find that path that takes me to any specific overarching solitary goal. But mine is not a completely unexamined life.
Tonight I’ll quixotically speak of grief of the little things. How grief resides in old houses torn down; the early Twentieth-century charming Craftsman on the corner with the wraparound porch and finely made barge rafters. The house I once dreamed of when I thought of the perfect home to raise my kids in. The house was torn down to make way for two side-by-side urban townhouses that fit into what was once a normal residential lot. The young urban professionals who live there likely don’t even feel a rattling of the bones of the neighborhood that once thrived on the block. I live in an apartment still. I grieve for that.
There’s a strange kind of grief that I felt yesterday as I walked through the local Goodwill store with my daughter, searching for vintage clothes on which she could practice sewing techniques and redesign. As I came across the aisles and bins of books, I saw dusty bottom shelves filled with now-obsolete Encyclopedia Britannicas and World Book encyclopedias. Funny that. It was an element of time I never thought I’d miss; when I was a kid, the encyclopedia salesmen were persistent and often irritating. But my family had a set of World Books from around 1960, with an updated volume that included a biography of the newly elected John F. Kennedy. I learned to read from those books and from the Oxford English Dictionary. I learned of Kennedy and Einstein, Hitler and Oppenheimer. I guess you might call it my first real exposure to politics.
It’s a strange kind of grief, ill-defined and somewhat unsettling, to grieve for a set of marketing-focused books, made for a newly minted, educated, ownership American society, post WWII. I work online in the tech industry and well know the merits of the ability to instantly update transient information. But imagine the work-hours that were once put into the compiling and recompiling of encyclopedias on a yearly basis; the printing, the binding, the sequencing – what to keep, what to update, what to obsolete. And then, of course, the rigors of convincing a mostly rural public that buying the encyclopedias, on time and month-by-month, would give them their special window to knowledge of the world. By the time most families had purchased a full set, it was time to start again, because the world had expanded to a more complete set of facts. Worlds do that and encyclopedia sellers used to deny it.
There is the grief of failure. There are a lot of things I could enumerate as my peculiar and personal failures. I’ve surely grown the list too long. I grieve over the failure of relationships, lately – both intimate and personal, and friendship and family. I've lost a great many to death, but I believe I've lost more to inertia. I have nothing specific to state beyond the sometimes, at some hours of the day or night, for a just a few brief moments, or on certain days, the entire day, complete loss of connection with those who were once made an important part of my life. How and why have I let these go? Because these losses are failures of mine, I grieve for myself. I’ll move on from this grief eventually. I can’t begin to believe this grief is a cleansing grief, as sometimes grief can be. But I will move on – there are gaps in my life ahead that I will be compelled to fill again. I call this grief a step toward the future, shall I? Time will tell.
Please share whatever issues of grief are on your mind tonight...this installment tonight is in honor of all the fathers who are no longer with us, my own included. Miss you, Daddy.
Previous Installments in the series:
June 11, 2007 – The Grieving Room - a Monday night series
June 5, 2007 - The Grieving Room - The Bedroom
May 28, 2007 – The Grieving Room – Memorial Day
May 21, 2007 - The Grieving Room - when does one heal?
May 14, 2007 - The Grieving Room - a Monday night series
May 7, 2007 - The Grieving Room - a Monday night series
Apr 30, 2007 – The Grieving Room - a Monday night series
Apr 23, 2007 - The Grieving Room – Paso Doble
Apr 16, 2007 - The Grieving Room - a weekly support diary
Thank you for reading The Grieving Room this evening. If anyone would like to volunteer for a future Monday, please drop a line to smnytx@yahoo.com.
