Out from the Grave

‘grief is like a slow digging-out from    
the grave you left them in’.      
     
I lay there, trying to put into words my own experience of loss to one caught in its’ waves.      
   
As it is wont to do, my body tried to fill in for the sheer inadequacy of words. Reenacting grief’s journey, my hand moved fluidly above my bare breasts, forming a chasm, cutting down from upper left, long and deep through the middle, cleaving back up to the right. Each subsequent trough becoming more shallow, eventually forming an almost smooth line at the surface.      
     
He might have (rightly) conjured up the gradual calming of a fierce ocean storm. But I was envisioning a grave, someone else’s grave.   Dirvish hands invoking a repeated digging out and up...      
     
...up to the surface.      
     
The first indulation enfolding one deep down into the earth, bound tightly to the lost. God, it feels right to be right there, only there, in that dark, cold void with them.      
     
Gradually, a wave pulls upward and away, the intense need for oxygen a betrayal to the love left below.      
     
Then, bidden or not, the descent comes again (and again). Each return voyage into the depths a bit more shallow, the ascent back out quickening ever so slightly.      
     
...intense pain yielding to      
sadness yielding to      
guilt yielding to      
longing....      
     
The storm gradually retreats, seas calm.      
     
Time is a wench. She steals the ones we love too soon, almost always too soon. Then, bit by agonizing bit, she goes after the very pain that binds us tight to them, slowly evicting us from a grave that was never ours to claim.      
       
R.      
     
-written for those of us left back on the shore