They say that the hardest thing about dealing with someone dying is that the rest of the world goes on like nothing happened. Apocalypse would be easier to deal with, because then at least the world would stop to recognize the magnitude of the circumstances and show a little respect. But the average death, the average cessation of a human life, goes unnoticed and uncharted by all but a handful of the 7,000,000,000 human residents of this particular sphere. It keeps spinning, literally and figuratively, and its inhabitants keep trying to carve out a buck or a rupee or a yuan or whatever it is that gives their life the appearance of meaning.
It is harder, I might posit, when the person who died is technically actually still alive. And harder still, perhaps, when it is oneself who has somehow died, who persists in a sort of waking mortis. Whose purpose and causes and order for things have all disintegrated irreparably, and yet no one is mourning for a person or people they presume to still be breathing. Worry is not the same as mourning. Worry is what most of the world spends most of its time doing. It is as trivial as eating or excreting, and just as interesting. Mourning, on the other hand, requires recognition that that about which we worry has already been transcended, eclipsed, surpassed.
I find my circumstances fittingly reflected on the Raritan River as I traverse its cold concrete bridge from time to time during my newly re-established weekly schedule in New Jersey. The Raritan, a river of incredible breadth, though likely little depth, has frozen almost solid for most of this season, accumulating heaps of snow that have persistently adhered to the semipermeable surface of the frigid waters. And my life could be likened to one shuffling along the Raritan, one whose desire to cross the river is pedestrian and compulsive, whose awareness of the lethally swift undercurrent beneath the shaky shelf is either blissfully ignorant or wantonly dismissive. It’s not like I’m stepping or jumping or running across the river. But I’m not exactly taking the bridge either. And every step, with random aplomb, carries the risk of the whole venture getting irreparably soaked.
The cracks are all over the apartment, the fissures and cacophonous severance of protective ice littering boxes and walls and shelving and papers strewn all about the place. I can build on a day or two or ten and feel pretty good most of the time, snow falling and packing in over the water, subzero temperatures sealing the last remaining gaps. But silently the weakness lurks, waiting for, if not the perfect time, a particularly unpredictable time to strike, to knock me down to size, to remind me how my own circumstances are as fragile as the last lonely layer of ice itself.
Such is the nature of disaster and its time-lapsed affects on the human perspective. I am hardly unique in any of this – indeed, such grief is incumbent in the human condition. But like a deep illness or a staggeringly unexpected injury, it bears contemplation like nothing else. The pain is capable of such vastness, such overwhelm, such sudden acuteness, that it can only be met with meditation, acknowledgment, and ultimately deep appreciation for the power of same. There are lots of reasons for me to hold my tongue in this late instance, this late-night running afoul of reminders of how deeply I was loved, how profoundly I was betrayed. But the merit of pondering openly, of considering the precise shape and dimension of the instigation of my suffering, it outweighs any possible concerns of backlash or misunderstanding. And it is perhaps worth noting that it is only alone, only alone amongst artifacts and memories and the vastness of time, that such fissures are likely to open and swallow me whole.
Would that the snow pile up all night, outpacing the makeshift plow trucks traversing the roadways and the hurried annoyed East Coasters as they slide and shuffle for the doorways. Would that it pile so high as to block doorways and fell trees and impede every aspect of tired daily routine. Then, at least for a day, there would be acknowledgment of enormity, of something so vast that all would take notice, all would be in recovery.
This is not the way of the world. How we carry our own grief, like all else we think and feel, is what defines our life. Is my effort to discuss it the effort to shoulder it among friends, to pass my backpack to others as I struggle beneath its weight? Or is it merely my own log of fording countless rivers, impervious to the underlying reality reflected by the water itself, flowing unseen and uncontrollable? Whether I get to control my course across solid ice or whether the flow of everything will be determined by an overriding current seems, at this moment, entirely up to chance.
