The soldiers in dress blues didn’t make it to the door.
My mother’s teenaged sister saw them approaching through the curtains. “Betty, I think those soldiers are coming here.”
Mom broke apart before “here” and she never got put back together again. There was no kintsugi for this. Grief flowed out of her and filled the room and it’s taken me 50 years to understand that everyone near her took part of her pain into themselves, a strange absorption as if a sponge could take in a stream (or was it an ocean?) and still somehow feel the same as if it were dry.
Maybe that’s the miracle of being four. No matter how much you take in you’re light and airy. But lately, like a long-dormant liquid that’s gone solid, my body feels the weight of that grief. It’s not like water that becomes less dense as it turns to ice. Like most things that flow, as it hardens it weighs more.
I used to listen to the radio a lot as a child, mostly what my teenaged aunts and uncles had on. One of the songs on the radio in the winter that followed the summer my dad’s body was ripped apart in Vietnam, the winter of 1971, came on last night, “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
Kris Kristofferson wrote it on the deck of an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico, near the helicopter he flew. Its singular melody contains a sadness that connects my heart to that time, to gospel times and rural times and Southern ground. I heard a cover that Bryan Adams recorded a few years ago, one that takes the transitory, dime-store novel feeling of the lyric and gives it a bit more permanence, like a song someone might sing to a ghost spouse.
What does one do with the wine of female grief? It’s in me and binds me to her in ways that I did not feel when she was alive. I did not cry at her funeral until I saw my sisters crying.
I cry more now. Surprising things make we cry. Not many tears. But enough. Little things. Sudden things. Did the grief need to get heavier before I felt it, before it could—this of course makes no immediate sense—move within me, before it could leave? How long does it take to wring a river or an ocean from a small sponge in the hand? How have I held it all these years?
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