#exploring grief

Dear Mourner,

One can only assume why you stand amongst the city of the dead, looking onwards with grief in your eyes. I won't ask who, much less when or why. This is a place for silence beyond your bated breath and the sway of the breeze. A place to grieve the lost and to-be lost.

I used to stand where you're standing. I was an observer to the graves of people I knew and wanted to know. Their corpses six-feet down murmured thanks and prayers, but largely didn't care. It was formality.

I wasn't there for them.

On the edges of this cemetary are the mass graves I watched over. I was here at dawn and dusk, when the sun kissed the horizons and when it slumbered behind clouds. Through flooding rains and ashey snows. When the tombstones behind me were painted with flowers and tears of legacies, and when they were cracked and barren. I waited and watched these graves without question or thought.

They were buried poorly in the beginning. A grasping hand turned cream-colored without blood or breath. Nails drained to a grimaced violet. Teeth yellowed and cracked with the sun's patient rays. It was unnatural to see children without laughter and eyes deflated into their skulls. But they stared back at me, waiting to see me leave like the others. I stayed, of course, and gently buried them deeper with hands stricken by frostbite.

Carrion birds sought them out, to smother the nameless graves and scatter them across the treetops. I wouldn't let them and buried them further and further when I could. With every scrape and claw at the hardened dirt I muttered a prayer of peace and apology. Something that would never be answered. No one else would bury them, just unearth them to dance their corpses about like toys, then abandon them like the rest.

Not I.

Every day I mourn them. I scantly know their names, for they are my own. Forgotten syllables and poetries that barely grace the lips of the living anymore. But I stopped begging forgiveness from them long ago, because they cannot give me peace. Nor do I want them to. But the bodies continue to broach the dirt, hands outstretched as if pleading for an embrace.

As of this letter, I have not taken that embrace yet. I will, eventually, but who will guard the tombs of the forgotten children? Certainly not you; these are not your bones to bare. Instead, grieve who you came here for, dear Mourner. Maybe one day you'll crawl out of this cemetary with your soul preserved, and not just spilt in letters.

Until we pass each other again,

What Would You Like Included in a Book About Grief?

It seems as if I am being pulled back into the world of grief, not because I am having upsurges of grief, but because other people are discovering my grief posts and my grief book. Also, I have been talking to friends as they go through their grief upsurges, and at the same time, I am getting emails from newly bereft people who have read Grief: The Great Yearning,a sort of memoir about my first…