of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn.
I cannot accept that our dance has not been truncated. It has. We were in mid-stride. We were just about getting it right. Sometimes we were really spectacular—dancing with the stars. Sometimes we were pedestrian—inconsistent, but showing promise. We just needed a little more practice.
Still, Lewis does hit the right note at the end of this passage when he writes, “to love the very Her, and not to fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.” That’s the great difficulty, I believe, and my great fear. In this new phase of our dance of love, how am I to love Linda, the very her, and not my memory of her, or some fiction I have created of her? Loving the beloved who has died, Lewis observes, is like loving God:
The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.
But “this” is not now imaginable. In that respect H. and all the dead are like God. In that respect loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him. In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of love—its eyes cannot here be used—to the reality, through—across—all the changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings. I mustn’t sit down content with the phantasmagoria itself and worship that for Him, or love that for her.
Lewis seems right about this. But he names a challenge that I don’t know how to meet.
One way I have tried to meet it is to gather, greedily, perceptions and stories of Linda from others who knew her, who saw sides of her I rarely saw. I grieve that I will never again be startled by her unpredictable, utterly singular self, surprising me again, giving birth to new dimensions of our love, revealing new facets of the diamond.
Day I: Close of the Day [Compline]
[Sung]
| In manus tuas, Domine, | Into your hands, O Lord |
| Commendo Spiritum meum: | I commend my spirit: |
| Redemisti me, Domine, | For thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, |
| Deus veritatis. | God of Truth. |
—Roman Breviary
Day I: Night [Vigil]
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice!
My soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
—Psalm 130:1–2a, 6 (NRSV)
Time is the canvas
Stretched by my pain.
—Rilke
Grief’s Anguish: Night throws darkness over the grieving soul. Daylight sometimes makes it possible to see through the fog of sadness, but nighttime drives out that one grace. Nighttime is the hour of grief’s anguish. Nighttime can happen any hour of the day. Sometimes, as Rilke puts it, grief encases me like a massive rock:
I am so deep inside it
I can’t see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.
It is like nothing else in my experience; I am unable to get my bearings, movement seems impossible.
Since I still don’t know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
In my grieving, I have allowed sadness in the door when it knocked. But grief’s anguish never stands politely at the door. It doesn’t knock, it doesn’t announce itself. It bursts in, bludgeons me, grabs me by my jaw and reaches down into my stomach and pulls my gut inside out. Grief’s anguish is raw, utterly physical. It rudely shoves thought entirely out of the room. It is mindless and mad. Uncontrollable. Demonic. I am in its power, powerless; suspended, lifted off the ground and out of time. I am unable to see beyond the moment, unable to see. The cries echoing from the walls around me startle me with their ugliness.
The pain continues to wave over me!
Stop it, O God,
please stop it!
. . .
I think I’m in control,
but I can’t stop
the undulating ache
that wells up suddenly
and overwhelms me
until I collapse
from grief.
—Ann Weems
Grief’s anguish can be conjured by a thought or memory, by the to-do list found in the bedside table, the unfinished knitting on the closet shelf.
Remembered happiness is agony;
so is remembered agony.
I live in a present compelled
By anniversaries and objects:
your pincushion; your white slipper;
. . .
the label basil in a familiar hand;
a stain on flowery sheets.
—Donald Hall
It takes nothing more than touching something of hers to blow the door wide open. One of the most powerful attacks of grief’s anguish came when I brushed against one of Linda’s favorite jackets hanging in the closet next to my sport coat.
Grief, at its deepest, is physical. Utterly, frighteningly physical.
“How much does matter matter?” the poet Mary Jo Bang asks. “Very.” is her simple answer.
What I want desperately is Linda’s touch. The pain of its absence is sharper than the thrust of any knife.
The pain is evident in the icon of the Lamenting Virgin.
Lamenting Virgin (Theotokos Threnousa)
The depth of the virgin’s grief is evident in her deep-set eyes; too deep, it seems, for tears. Yet it is not her countenance that expresses the deepest truth of grief; it is her gesture. The inclination of Mary’s head and the position of her hands recall other, much more familiar icons. In one, Theotokos Eelousa (Virgin of Compassion) or Theotokos Glykophilousa
