GRIEF ITSELF (an essay in progress) Yesterday, a great soul entered the Hall of Ages. The great Robin Williams died, apparently. He was a loving husband, father, son, sibling, colleague, friend, neighbor, counselor to so many, a leading light of our generation. Future cultural historians will name Robin Williams among the single greatest humorists of all time. I would call him the greatest in mine. As we mourn together, we also celebrate the joy he brought us. As we mourn together, we may also alone. We honor the fallen. We also comfort the living even as we seek and find comfort for ourselves, while in this awful process of grief, that we cannot love but hate as we must its undeniable reality, the relentless fact of grief itself. What then is grief, and what is it not? Grief is not selfish. Grief is not gloating, egotistical, on how wronged one has been by others or a god. Let us set aside God for a moment. God deserves His/Her/Its time and place. If the universe (or Universe) is conscious at all as some suggest, it is likely unconscious of human beings at all or barely. Do we expect The Universe to be so conscious of us as our Sunday school teachers taught? “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” wrote/sang the Psalmist/s. The lives of s/Stars might deserve i/Its a/attention, as C.S. Lewis conveyed in one of the books of The Narnia Chronicles. The thoughts of the Universe/God should be more universal than ego-, ethno-, or even bio-centric as we know it. Mine are. Even mine. Even now. I remember too clearly my first Thanksgiving away from home. It was my first year in the Army. Christmas wasnt much better. But I have always found a comforting community in reading. In literature, homesickness is a universal theme. Homesickness IS a matter of love, unrequited love. Homesickness is grief. Grief is love. Grief is a process, a phase, a stage of love that comes to us all as surely as death. We are hard-wired to honor them --- grief, home-sickness, love-sickness. Some wd say a benevolent God created the universe, all living things, human beings. If so, then God designed death into the fabric of the universe. Myself [sniff], Id have done better. All living things die, apparently. Not only that, we also live off of each other. We are vampires; we eat each other. All conscious life, as we know consciousness and life, survive off the dead or dying. Animal or vegetable, what is the difference? This is not a simple, rhetorical question. “Some design!” as Christopher Hitchens and/or Richard Dawkins said. “Some designer!” Its god-damned disgusting. Do I hear an amen?! [THIS IS THE END OF PART ONE] Others wd deny that death is, in fact, that it exists at all. The belief in life after death or resurrection can be see as denial of death, that may be comforting at some level. I sympathize w/ the grieving, having grieved for my grandparents and parents. Deeply, w/ every square milliliter on my muscle, corpuscle, gene, and meme; I grieve. We are afraid of the dark. There are nocturnal creatures that wd eat us, before we can eat them. Lions and tigers and bears. Real bloodthirsty ones. There are demons of the mind. Maybe it doesnt really matter how we die. Some deaths seem worse than others. Some lives are more painful than others. So are some deaths. But death itself is the source of our pain here. Not the means of it. I do not condemn the great artist for the death he chose. It wouldnt matter if I did. But I chose not to diminish his life in doing so. I chose not to undermine the extraordinary achievement that was the performance art, the humor, the ministry of Robin Williams. Who of us wd go back in time, if we could, to the Williams house, to yesterday morning, and pound on the door and shout, “Robin! Robin! No no no! Stop! Dont do it!” Any of us or all of us. The streets of San Francisco wd have been made impassable for jammed millions of us. We wd do anything to prevent his death and grief that we are feeling right now. But we cannot. And why exactly is that? Believers in the loving God of Christianity, might well ask, “Does God know what Hes doing?” If so, who among us wd say that death is therefore not a g/Good t/Thing? I dont know the answer. I have more questions too, even harder ones. Who among us wd wish for Robin Williams a lingering painful death by cancer like that of Christopher Hitchens or my mother? [This is the end of this draft. It is going somewhere … somewhere “lighter”.]
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 22:39:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015