‘On grief…’

Friday, January 20th 2023
9:14 pm

Hi there, been a while..
I’m on my way back from my grandparents’. Fridays are always calm and quiet. The loudest sounds are my thoughts. Even those are stronger than the sometimes brutal voices in my head. They are days of reflecting meticulously yet smoothly, and really without effort, on everything.

I’m thinking about the dead. About grief, and how it’s said that grief is really all the unexpressed love. This last phrase may trigger us all because we would kill for one extra minute to express all our amor to our late ones. However, lately I’ve been having this recurring belief. I think, I believe the dead know that we love them. I really rest assured sometimes that they do know of this love that we failed to express to them whilst they were still flesh and bones. At times I even come to think that they smile teasingly at us whilst we shed a tear or so; their way of saying “we know your love for us, shed some more tears whilst you can” (in a banter kind of way).

Maybe to us, the love is unexpressed. And I don’t know if this is a form of self-consolation, but maybe to them this love is indeed expressed. Or more like being expressed currently. It’s expressed in the form of the tears that crawl down our tender cheeks at their remembrance or of looking at our pictures together. It’s in the form of the deep talks that we have with our close friends about them. It’s in the form of our random smiles as we hear an echo of their laughter at the corner of the street. It’s in the form of the chuckle that we make at the realisation that our sibling or our friend is so much like them in a crazy funny way. It’s in the form of the prayers that we make for them, and the donations that we confer on behalf of their souls. It’s in the form of our copy-pasting all that they used to do, not deliberately as a way of honouring them, but because so much of them is so subtly ingrained in us that we are unconsciously a ‘jigsaw puzzle’ of them.

I expect that the velum separating the dimensions of both our worlds is a one-way portal, where only they can see us. They see all of the aforesaid. They see us. And they know. They know it all. With us in every step of the way, witnessing the failures and accomplishments. Witnessing us continue this life, which I hope at the specific juncture, they find it comforting that they are no longer a part of; thereupon and hopefully it is because they are now a part of a prodigious project. And finally, my dear life comrades, they actually do know of that love that we harbour for them. They really do.

What if grief isn’t actually ‘unexpressed love’ but rather it is ‘delayed expressed love’, and its pain stands in the assumption that our love is never delivered to the dead?

With love,
SE.