by Nils Peterson
- This is what they told me in Montana.
“If you encounter a bear, walk, don’t run, away. Move slowly – don’t make eye contact – If the bear charges – stand your ground. If the grizzly continues to come at you, lie face flat on the ground, hands clapped around the back of your neck, and play dead. The bear will likely leave you alone or paw you inflicting only minor injuries.”
Well, that puts a lot of hope in likely.
So. let’s think of grief as a bear.
If you encounter a grief, you might well want to walk or run away and not make eye contact. But it’s better to stand your ground. If it keeps coming, lie face flat on the ground. Let it paw you. Its injuries won’t be minor, will hurt. But when they scar over, I won’t say heal, you’ll be different. Grief also will be different, likely even companionable.
Well, that too puts a lot of hope in likely.
After I wrote the above, I realized that grief isn’t always bearish. It has other, more subtle ways of being – the quality of being there always though you don’t notice until some small thing calls its presence forth, a word, a phrase, a look, a sudden awareness of absence, a shadow.
I thought “like a shadow” and remembered the old Robert Louis Stevenson poem, “My Shadow.” Here’s the second stanza,
The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.
Well, much like grief.
I’ve been a Barbershop Quartet Singer for most of my life starting back in 1952. We called ourselves The Nils Brothers playing off the name of the great Mills Brothers. It’s a joke past its time because most of the people who would remember the name of the original have passed. But, wherever I lived I would find a bass, a baritone, and real tenor to join my baritone that could hit one or two high f’s an evening and we’d call ourselves The Nils Brothers.
We used to sing an arrangement of “Me and My Shadow.”
And when it’s 12 o: clock
We climb the stair
We never knock
For nobody’s there.
I remember the old vaudeville performer Ted Lewis in his old tux and battered top hat. I must have seen him on the Ed Sullivan show where he sang that song. After, he’d look out at the audience and ask, “Is everybody happy?” a line that floated complicatedly in the air.
Theodore Roethke has somewhere in one of his poems a line that goes something like “I fear those shadows most that start from my own feet.”
Where I am now? I offer Eudora Welty’s version of Fats Waller saying, “Truth is something worse, I ain’t said what, yet. It’s something hasn’t come to me, but I ain’t saying it won’t. And when it does, then want me to tell you?”
That’s where I am now when I try to talk about grief.
- This is from a sort of journal I kept when my senior citizen housing was in a lockdown during the Covid epidemic. My wife was dying of ALS and just before the lockdown, my eldest daughter moved in to help me and Judith out. After Judith passed, it was time for my daughter to go back to her own home.
Yesterday my daughter Erika moved out of my apartment where she’s been a 24- hour-a-day hospice nurse and then a companion and looker-afterer of her old man. It was time to get back to her own family and her own life and her job which she’ll continue to do from her home by computer starting next Monday.
So in the afternoon I was sitting reading in the living room and all of a sudden there was a profound silence that went so very, very deep in me. After a moment, I realized that what had happened was the refrigerator stopped its refrigeration noise and silence filled all my space. The silence felt like that momentous moment in the movies when a young woman enters a convent. She looks out through a grate for a last look at the world. Then the grate shuts, the world’s gone, she’s alone.
Wordsworth writes “Nuns fret not at their convents narrow rooms,” but he’s talking about writing sonnets, not actually living in seclusion. Where I live, we are not supposed to leave our apartments. My narrow room is an almost thousand square foot apartment filled with books and all sorts of gadgets. It is comfortable. Decent meals are brought to my door three times a day. A cleaner breaks the barrier once a week keeping her six foot distance. I move from room to room to keep out of her way. There is a house television channel over which they send exercise tapes and movies, offer good advice and yoga, I even read poems on it once a week. And yet….
I miss the sound of Judith’s Bipap machine during the night that had accompanied our sleep for months, and this morning I missed the gentle sound of Erika’s snore in the next room as she was sleeping on the mattress she dragged from her house so she could stay with us.
Maybe I wish the refrigerator would hum all of the time so I would not keep hearing the sound of silence.