For tonights Yizkor (remembrance) prayer at the concluding day(s) of Passover, a quote from Justin Cronins novel, Mary and ONeill: Though some might have thought this a morbid scene, a pair of orphans moping around the house, in fact the weeks following their parents’ death passed quickly. It became…a time of strange and unexpected contentment. Unhappiness, they discovered, was an emotion distinct from grief, and so they found it was possible to both miss their parents terribly- a loss so overwhelming you simply couldn’t take it all in, like looking at a skyscraper up close- while also finding in the job of settling their affairs a satisfying orderlinenss. Accounts to be closed, bills paid, letters to be read and discarded, clothing to be boxed and carted off: they knew what they were doing- erasing their parents, removing the last evidence of their lives from the earth. It was a way of saying goodbye, and yet with each trip to the Goodwill box, each final phone call to a bank or a loan company, he felt his parents becoming real to him in a way that they had never been in life. More than real: he felt them move inside him. These two children had slipped into a pattern that was, they realized, the same one their parents had kept, or nearly. The hours they ate, worked and slept, their habit of meeting in the living room in the evenings for a cup of tea- these were all things their parents had done…they were at once their parents and themselves and so they felt they had been touched by the world of the spirits.”
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 23:00:00 +0000
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