ABSENT FRIENDS

ABSENT FRIENDS
There are no words for grief. There are no ways to feel another's
sorrow. The heart can only understand by personal experience, although
friends do their best. And I? I was a widow. Workmates avoided me for a
few weeks. Then they started to say, with forced smiles: "Well, its
been almost a month now, you must be getting over it, eh?" As though
bereavement was like the 'flu, distressing but curable within a span of
time. I'd often wondered what widows did, how widows managed. I found
out. Widows go on living. They shop, cook, clean, budget and plan, for
one. The house once filled by partnership echoes in its emptiness. One
person is not enough to occupy the spaces in the daylight, nor to
dispel the shadows in the darkness of the night. Every corner aches
with memories, every piece of music on every CD draws tears from the
well of pain that loss has bored deep, deep down inside the barely
living one left behind. For me, there were no children to take up the
slack on the cable that had suddenly been cut by death. I thought at
the time children would have been a comfort. I could have been strong
for them, but for myself? Why bother!

I made myself a shell of socially acceptable strength. People
congratulated me on coping, on getting on with my life, my work. I was
invited out frequently at first, then the risk of an unattached woman
in the midst of so many couples and the awkward problem of how to team
her up with a male, straight or gay, to make the table seating balance,
meant that the invitations petered out. Loneliness is a state of mind
for which we are ourselves responsible. Isolation is imposed upon us by
others.

Then, only then, I was shocked by all the other kinds of grief, the
other ways in which bereavement impoverishes us all. Divorce that
bereaves partners of their hoped for future and children of their
parents. Unemployment that bereaves the jobless of their identity and
social context. Physical disability that bereaves the stricken of their
former capacities. Mental illness that bereaves the sufferers of their
very selves. My healing came slowly. It flowed from acceptance of my
loss, from learning to be myself, to feel complete alone and to stand
firm on my own behalf. But more than that, I I absorbed into myself
what I had looked at many times and never understood. Grief is the
natural state of things. We are taught that happiness is our
birthright. We believe that love, warmth, security and pleasure in
people around us, in work, in daily life, are our true friends and will
always be there for us. Until we pass through the valley of the shadow
of death, we cannot comprehend that they are, all too often, absent
friends.

? LINDY MCNAUGHTON JORDAN, 2002 (479 words)