To Observe a Grief

"I have no photograph of her that's any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination. Yet the odd face of some stranger seen in a crowd this morning may come before me in vivid perfection the moment I close my eyes tonight. No doubt, the explanation is simple enough. We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions - waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking - that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur. But her voice is still vivid."

C. S. Lewis, "A Grief Observed"

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Dear Alex,

I've searched for it but it's gone: the only poem I remembered from school. Though a blur, the poet's words about grief stay vivid, hung faintly as coat in closet, draped with fingers on coffin. In grieving, skeletons sink with skeletons.

Now I see it daily in faces and it slinks out of closet and coffin. This gloom under the noon sun slops over you, a slab of darkness, an island too shallow for burial.

The faces of lovers and brothers can be a blur. But depression soaks into faces as wine in leather, swooning over you to no end. It comes to you gallantly, interlocks with your ribs and takes you to a gaseous realm. The faces of depression strain and streak in so many angles, so many lights and expressions that all the images converge into the dense black hole of a pupil in max dilation. I am looking at it and I cannot see it because it is not a point or speck but a hyper-reality.

"A Grief Observed" is a book C. S. Lewis did not intend to write after the death of his wife. Instead he sketched his interior weight of bereavement on notebooks which he later compiled into this book reluctantly but with purpose in mourning with us. In its prelude, the son of Lewis’ late wife described the reason for such a book conceived in the savagery of greater grief that follows greater love: "I had yet to learn that all human relationships end in pain... Those of us who have walked this same path, or are walking it as we read this book, find that we are not, after all, as alone as we thought."

Last month, I talked about my grief with a psychiatrist for my first time outside of work. I have never met him before. If I close my eyes now, I can still sketch his face in my mind. And I shall always remember him from our first encounter. Solemnly round, his eyes are black holes in Milky Way, magnetic in compassion. Grief in photograph is too vivid to be seen with the naked eye.

Your, Kate

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Dear Kate,

Why do we grieve?  And of all the things we can grieve for, how do we pick and choose what to lose our heart over?

We can feel so much but do so little about our feeling, that's why we grieve, I think.

I said feel, not know, because we can know everything and care about nothing, and we wouldn't grieve when we don't care.

Yet when we start to emote and care, we realize our care is not enough, the rest of the world doesn't care about our caring, and if anyone is to climb on the same bandwagon to share our same care, they likely wouldn't share the identical whys and hows to care even about the same thing or person.

This is a paragraph from the novel I am writing.  Here I call the character D because I don't want to reveal his name until the novel is ready.

“Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost." This is not the sort of cynicism D wants to succumb to; it stops the world from turning in the right direction, he thinks. Or turning at all. Still, now that he’s taken by the devil he wonders if someone shoulda looked out for him a little bit. But who? He’s not trying to discredit anyone, but there really is no one, not a face that is made in the image of D, not even a gesture that would point the world to who he really is. He looks around the kitchen. If he pays attention he would agree everything is alive, the world around him is somehow moving, everything seems to speak and speak about something. But who is speaking for D?

It took me a long time to write this paragraph.  I've gone through four previous drafts and discarded them all.  Because they have vocabs and tall ideas in them.  In one draft I even ventured to speak about "a social contract proposed and accepted with every Christmas toast."  In a way you can say I've written myself four more sophisticated tellings of the same narrative but decided against them all.

Now I know my mission.  The novel is not about the whys and hows of how Alex feels.  It is about D.  If D is not speaking to me, I have nothing to speak for him.  Sometimes I would stare at a blank page for hours before he would open his mouth a little.  He's reticent and always hesitant, even evasive.

I will wait.

Yours, Alex