Grandmum Bolton, my paternal grandmother, died last Sunday in the Royal Blackburn Hospital in northern England. I had been with her a few hours before she slipped away, had the chance to thank her for what she had given me and say goodbye.
The latter half of this year has been a difficult time for me. In the space of a few months I have lost, in addition to my grandmother, several elderly friends who were dear to me: my grandmother-in-law Betty Jean Seal, my parents’ neighbor, Wilford Winholtz, and a funny old man, Harold Woodhouse, who made me laugh when I was a child.
Grief, then, has become the preoccupation of the moment, a bitter-sweet wave that ebbs and flows. Usually it just laps softly at the edges of my soul; occasionally it comes crashing with the power of a storm at sea, loosening my moorings and tearing me adrift.
I feel like I have lost a physical, anchoring connection to a part of the past, to a place, to an era – like a tent peg has come loose, leaving the flysheet to flap wildly, unrooted, in the wind.
And yet, the terrifying mystery of death has become just a little more mundane, more intimate. Death is like the fierce and powerful old patriarch who I have always feared, but with whom I now feel a sense of familiarity. I nod to him and he nods back; I catch the softening of his expression, maybe even the start of a small smile. He betrays a small crack of humanity in his stern ferocity.
Last night I went for a walk around the block to clear my head. I looked up at the stars and mused that each of our lives is the tiniest of blips on the timeline of those celestial bodies.
This recognition of life’s scarcity gives it value. That we will not live forever does not make me feel cheated or resentful, but rather that life must be treasured and well-lived. That we will lose friends and family is not, for me, a tragedy per se, but an injunction to love more fiercely.
If we were immortal we would never feel the need to heal a wounded relationship, to visit our relatives, to check off our ‘life list’ of things we’ve always wanted to do. We could eternally procrastinate.
I might not have been able to say this if I had lost friends who were younger, or whose life had been snatched away before their time, but I have come to find a grace implicit in grief. Grief, for me, is a profound recognition that everything is fleeting and that we are thus required to make our lives ones of deep meaning.
