Perspective

I finally arrived safely late afternoon yesterday after a memorable week. Stepping back and having a look toward me as though I were a stranger, has revealed how isolated I have become, partly out of grief, partly out of a sense of hopelessness that keeps dogging me.

Most of us from time to time negotiate our way through melancholy and sadness, and we usually emerge at some point beyond the dark insistences of those places. But your brother’s death has, for me, been something comprised of a completely different nature, so much heavier than I believe I have ever previously experienced.

We prefer to think that we are able to shape things, to bend them to our own will, to wrestle with the unanswerable and offer our own explanations. But in truth, we are carried along by the tide of time in much the same way that we are victimized by the forces that shape weather, so much larger than ourselves, and no less uncontrollable.

Perhaps what makes it appear differently to us is only an impression of the vaunted and foolishly elevated sense of our own importance, as we appear able to grasp, move, and rearrange many items within our reach and territory of apparently undeniable influence. This feeling of a facile and competent manipulation of the mundane within our immediate environment persists, and deludes us to imagine that is extensible to the greater, boundless area of the world, flying in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary, and which distracts us from the certainty of our own mortality, and the somber finality of the death that will claim with grim inevitability those we cherish, the longer that we live.

Possibly in the end, it is merely a deeply-rooted, human-centered response, a mechanistic reflex arc that allows us to plod onward, facing great odds, no less and no more than any other person that has walked much the same path as ourselves during our brief moment in history. It only remains for me to locate the insistent purpose in living that used to push my steps forward, and which I must reclaim in order to fill the regrettable, vacuous space formerly occupied by my son.