A Life for Living

Grief has a strange way of segmenting time.   To my knowledge, it is the only phenomenon that has the power to do so.   

When my father passed on, it seemed like living a dream.    Everything seemed surreal.  I knew I was alive, breathing, eating, sleeping, but time seemed to stand completely still.  I wasn't able to really determine where one day - or even moment - ended and the next one begin.   I was vaguely aware of going about the business of life - paying bills, making arrangements, speaking with loved ones, etc.  But somehow it didn't seem like it was me doing those things - it seemed like I was watching myself in slow motion on a screen somewhere, and that I was somehow removed from all of it, and that wherever I was it was outside of the touch of time. 

This eventually subsided, and the very real rhythm of life seemed to slowly return.   But outside of that, whenever I would think of my dad and let myself feel his absence, I would immediately return to that sense of being outside of time, and movies of my memories with him would play in my mind.  In those moments - which occurred long after his departure - I felt like I was absent from living. Not biologically dead myself, but not living either, somewhere in a gray area in between, where life doesn't quite reach, and death hasn't quite arrived yet. 

This is grief.  For me, it was an initial heavy, overwhelming sadness that was slowly - over time - was replaced by a deep, melancholic meandering into the realm of memories. Every memory seemed so precious:  like photographs, they were all I had left, and I couldn't bear to not remember them, but at the same time, remembering them was so terribly painful, because they reminded me of all I could not see, touch, or hear.   

I continued on this way for quite some time - falling into moments outside of time where I would replay all the movies made of the memories of a life with my dad - and then dropping back into time and the routine of daily life.  These seamless transitions in and out of the day-to-day continued for quite a while.   I was reluctant to share with anyone that this became my routine; I had no desire to hear the "well, life goes on" or the well-intended but absolutely meaningless "your father would want you to move on and live a good life."   It was a place of alone-ness; solitude.  And it was both comforting and disconcerting all at once. 

Grief has a strange way of segmenting time. 

It was during this lull (that's what I like to call it) in the noise of life that I came to realize that living - and life itself - is comprised of a string of moments, one after another, pressed together in the tightly confined spaces of our selective imaginings, so that at any moment we are experiencing life while at the same time not realizing that we are experiencing it.  We are caught up in trying to live, and in that very effort we lose the focus on those moments of memory - those flashes of the real, of what matters, of the sacred.   And it's only later, when someone goes missing from that string of moments, that we realize how very critical it was for us to have been aware then, only we weren't.   

This is - I believe -what is meant by the old adage "life is for the living,"  - because I believe we can be alive without biological living, and that living is separate from biological functions.    It is my hope that we can learn to string together these moments - these memories - in a more meaningful way, so as not to experience such poignant loss when we encounter the time when one of us goes missing from those moments.   After all, what is life for except for the sake of living itself?