House of Red
Grief is often isolating. Particularly when inhabiting a house of red. Meaning my current address is composed of walls and doors that lead a heart to fire.
Recently this is experienced as an impulse of protectiveness over the very use of the word grief. An irritation that seeds as I encounter articles, substacks and tweets whose authors (some of whom are well known writers, others simply acquaintances or friends) who choose to describe their response to certain difficult events and mishaps as grief: the “grief “that follows a break up, the “grief” experienced as a crisis of identity, the “grief” of leaving behind a city, the “grief” of having a neighborhood restaurant close down.
Why is it so important to reserve grief to the condition of suffering that is associated with the death of a loved one? Why can’t other forms of loss (a relationship, an understanding, a place) not be claimed in this same way? I have learned how the heartache and disorientation that follows the loss of a life; the irreversible; the ultimate “fin” of a being is incomparable.
Others are yet to learn.
The feeling of senselessness in response to witnessing and then having to live with a fatality is a phenomenon that touches upon the most unknowable and most impossible aspects of the human condition — non existence.
We write and think from experience. You reader might be fortunate to remain unfamiliar to what is being named.
The ending of a person, the ending of their body, their voice, their presence in the world and the royal void it creates. An experience for which only the word grief seems to be capable of holding.
Claim, because this specific word is needed to describe that:: perpetual strain in the chest one is woken up by as they are re-struck by the reality of an absence as infallible as death.
Claim, since there is a need to grasp the suffering that comes with knowledge, knowledge as the understanding of one’s new permanent world: your mother no longer shares the same time space reality. She will not be available on the other side of the watsapp thread, there are no hands to hold the flowers on Mother’s day, there is no decollatege on which her favorite Allure scent is sprayed, the mirror is blank where once she applied her lipstick so meticulously.
How is this to be confused with the parting of a physical space that remains in existence after we remove our bodies from it? How can the inability to bring back the dead be confused with the inability to resuscitate a great love story? The side of the bed is cold but his body is keeping a different side of a different bed warm. I cannot locate her body. I cannot locate it because I know what happened to it but I do not understand the other side of cremation.
None of us can.
Death has no returning visitors. Neither does a black hole.
Her new address is: …..
My new address is this red.
When I miss her, the feeling is a govett’s leap apart from the feeling of missing the touch of a lover or dear friend who is out of reach but who otherwise still, is.
Still is. I still, You are reading and there is certainty to you. This fabric of certainty vanishes when a body is left.
It was an early departure.
In mess and ache I need to condense these conditions to a singular word.
I’m soaking and my feet will leave a great mess but more relevantly the heart and mind are fatigued and I wish to hang them on a single hook as I enter my house of red.
God knows I have misused language.