Is Grief a Waiting

You hear the strange cricket in the oven

sing, and ask what it sings.

 

This is what it sings.

 

 

—Frank Bidart,

“The Third Hour of the Night”

Is grief a bridge?

There are a million things I should be doing right now. It’s close to midnight. Earlier, yet again, I burned dinner and my husband ate it without complaint. There are many things I never learned to do properly. I don’t know how to ride a bike. When I swim, I just kick and reach forward. Once I went swimming on a lonely beach in the Dominican Republic with only my girlfriend’s mother. My girlfriend was hungover, and slept in, and I wanted to go swimming. Her mother didn’t like that I was with her daughter, or that I had come at all to visit that summer, but seemed worried enough that I shouldn’t go alone. Her mother stayed close enough when I swam out too far. Not too far, but just at the edge of too far. At the edge of a stronger current wanting me, wanting to pull me out further. Years later, in an Arab village in East Jerusalem, I stood at the edge of a winding road near the top of a mountain; it was a sharp drop. There was no railing. I stood close enough to the edge to almost fall. This, too, was over love.

Is grief a condition of love? Does grief prevent us from making peace within ourselves and with each other? I have known for some time that we are the predecessors of peace, but it will never come from us. On that lonely beach in the Dominican Republic, my girlfriend’s mother called out that I’d gone too far. She kept calling as I swam back, as if her voice was pulling me from the deep. Later she said nothing about it to her daughter, what happened, about the bridge that had formed between us, that might-have-been most unfortunate. It was more than one bridge. It was our secret. At the end of my visit she squeezed my hand and said sadly, If only you were a boy.

In East Jerusalem I stood at the edge of a cliff in the village as night fell and some children ran out toward me and grabbed my arms, pulling me back, scolded me for walking as a woman alone at night. A mother, perhaps one of theirs, came to me in the night. She threw a blanket around my shoulders. I didn’t realize the temperature had dropped and I had no coat on. We stood there, huddled with the children running around us, as she called a cab to take me home. She knew I was Jewish. The children knew I was Jewish. I said nothing. Later, I didn’t go looking for her. I didn’t go looking for them. These are the weights of past would-have-beens that weigh heavier than full-on regrets.

Is grief a way to reach you as it does conceal you from me? Is grief a collective consciousness that slips through our fingers?

One morning she slid through me and I lost her (for I’ll always know it was her) and bled her out in my husband’s arms, and it seemed she was all over him. It did not happen that quickly all at once. It did. Our would-be child was all over us and he held me and it was raining outside and I felt that she would never stop pouring out of me, oh my beloved, oh endless swimming further away from me.

Is grief a tide that never quite pulls me lonely toward those I don’t know as well as I should? Is grief only told in complex grammar?

Or is it beyond the reach of words, a wakefulness as strong as silence filling a bridge on the first day of spring, when no car will cross and we choose to walk a treeless crumbling street and all heaven is falling the buildings, washing them clean? That morning he bathed me before he was sure it was okay, to wipe away what I never quite knew I was possible of, and in the end was not a possibility.

Is grief a premonition from a future self? Is it a milestone in simply being, or being burst by a night terror? Is it a stone or lifeline cast from worlds unknown?

Can you share it with another who is not yours in blood, who asks you to step back, waits for you to come to your senses? Can you ever truly know hers, get past her stranger? There are a million things I should be doing. It’s well past midnight. My husband has stayed up as I write this, waiting for me.

And is grief not a waiting, and a waiting that gives nothing of itself and yet is a gift of memory, an accomplice to the very end, a gravity to which we constantly readjust, a gravity in which we kick and reach forward.