the love of my life

Cheryl Strayed's genius and Naomi Kawase's silence.

i have never read a better description of grief than the one in Cheryl Strayed's article "The Love Of My Life."

I've spent all my life thinking grief is intangible, incomprehensible, ineffable, inaccurate in its scope and expansion. i have thought of grief as the sound of the chimes of my childhood house that a stray football hit and shattered into pieces. i have thought of it as the phone cover that has broken from all edges but perseveres, forming a protective layer around the phone, saving its interiors- losing its exteriors. i have imagined it to look like the math questions i have solved at the back of my entrance paper, the one that didn’t take me where i had wanted to go. i have never thought of it as plain. as a simple spread of dictation.

it builds up in slow burgeoning agonies. tiny, insignificant almost unmentionable. but it grows. you think you have spent time with it, the grief, the depth and sourness of its existence and then you realise it is not complex at all. it simply is. what an incredible thing, to write about it, to preach about it and to never fully be over your grief still. you are so inextricably involved with it and truly it is like it is alive. when i was too young to comprehend emotions, a senior used to equate them to organisms. they always said grief is the virus of the emotional world, it is nothing without you and you are nothing with it. you are always the host, it always a companion. what a sad thing to have known.

i often think about writings that seem to know exactly what they are talking about, like the particular piece in discussion. it is about loss, plain and simple. it is not about a lesson learnt from that loss, nor about the subdued understanding of the loss- it is just the existence of loss. it exists, and so do you. and sometimes you don’t find a way around it. this piece is so detached, so objectively written with a sense of “dictation” rather than narration. no embellished thoughts, no overwritten texts- simple facts. it must be so difficult to think of the one you have loved and lost and to associate them with the kind of emotion that has completely, and perhaps forever ruined your life.

i still struggle to grasp the “right way” of grieving the loss of something you have held so close to your heart for so long. i have come very close to that emotion, granted in a very different way, and as arduous as it is to acknowledge this- it is true, that the news of that loss has existed in its simplest form in my life and i have continued to exist despite. i recognise Cheryl Strayed’s desperation when she claims that she simply cannot continue to live after the death of her mother, while seemingly continuing to live even more recklessly. i recognise it because i have lived with that harrowing knowledge. i have walked in perfectly familiar corridors as a stranger, mostly invisible. i have spent every waking hour grieving the once familiar. and i have done it in the best possible way i know- by reminding myself that i simply cannot, anymore, continue to live and then live some more, recklessly.

“All the time that I’d been thinking, I cannot continue to live, I’d also had the opposite thought, which was by far the more unbearable: that I would continue to live, and that every day for the rest of my life I would have to live without my mother. Sometimes I forgot this, like a trick of the brain, a primitive survival mechanism. Somewhere, floating on the surface of my subconscious, I believed — I still believe — that if I endured without her for one year, or five years, or ten years, or twenty, she would be given back to me; that her absence was a ruse, a darkly comic literary device, a terrible and surreal dream.”

~ “The Love Of My Life”, Cheryl Strayed (2002)

i realise now that i have done exactly what Cheryl Strayed condemns in her writing. i have compared an insignificant loss of mine to hers, a much bigger one.

“And there is a difference. Dying is not your girlfriend moving to Ohio. Grief is not the day after your neighbor’s funeral, when you felt extremely blue. It is impolite to make this distinction. We act as if all losses are equal. It is un-American to behave otherwise: we live in a democracy of sorrow. Every emotion felt is validated and judged to be as true as any other.”

~ “The Love Of My Life”, Cheryl Strayed (2002)

and i suppose it is true. the loss of a loved one is bigger than just a loss of love. perhaps there is more to lose when there’s some material to it, the loss of an abstraction has to be lesser, right? can a parallel even be drawn? i would like to believe that material, visible and produced, has more value to be lost than amorphous conceptions.

there is a plethora of literature and art available on this particular theme- the loss of a loved one. somehow that genre is the only thing i’m consuming these days.

i watched “Katatsumori” on YouTube today. it is a short documentary filmed by Naomi Kawase about her grandmother, whom she loved so dearly, capturing her in her simplest. it was beautiful. the longer you sit with it the more you realise, grief is quiet. gentle. incessant. it lingers on in these words, in these films, anything that has the capacity to store which implies, perhaps most importantly, a heart.

i’ve googled, sorry incognitoed, how to grieve losses. none of it helped. what helped in the end, is the knowledge of its universality.

i’m unaware myself, as to why the permeating thought of its universality brings comfort more than despair. why doesn’t it bother me that most people experience the same torment, if not worse. i often wonder whether universality is at all a good thing, whether seeking comfort in it is virtuously a corrupt thing to do. i don’t know. and to be honest, i am glad that i don’t.

regardless, i’ve come to think of living like this- like life is lived in two worlds- one where we exist, our presence regarded and despised alike and another where we don’t, where we are missed and forgotten- alike.

i’m not sure if that is a good way to think of living. like i’m always on the verge of being forgotten. but to know that my absence will be felt and known, however little and by however few, is more comfort than i ever imagined i would get.

and perhaps, despite all the transience- this comfort is what makes grief valuable. the only tangible remnant of what you’ve lost, of yourself and them, to life and to time. something you can hold to yourself, something time can’t eventually erase. something only love figures and that is, at least to Cheryl Strayed and Naomi Kawase, all that really matters.