Modern Romanticism

Grief clings. Or is there something that we are clinging to, to keep grief alive? Perhaps it is something else other than even that. It might not be that we keep grief alive, while denial is what we first express upon hearing that we who loved has died. It might be that we keep hope alive, which can be why we deny.

Denial is an urge to utter the word “no” to a specific fact. Someone has died, and then we say “no” to that. Why? We are unable to believe it. But more than that, we cannot just process this information as if we can accept their passing all at once? Why? Because that’s like saying we can easily “move on” from their passing without much hindrance to our own life. Hope is indeed something we cling to because itself is a thing attached to life. Whether our life or someone else’s, who we grieve for is someone who was attached to us. A life attached to a life, though even after a death of either or, there’s still attachment.

What are we denying? Their death, of course; because it cannot be their life we deny. No, we have long accepted that they were a part of us. Their life, being gone, tells us that a part of us has left us. And so, we scream out words of desperation. Words that form questions that cannot ever be answered. We plead to our faith, to say, “God, why did you let this happen?” or we ask ourselves, after having trapped our mind in a suffocating thing like self-blame, a question that is, “Could I have done something to stop this?” It ought to understood that for all life, a great curse for beating hearts is to have questions that will never be answered.

Such questions we ask to others, whether of form of a lack thereof, and of questions we ask ourselves are not meant to be answered. For if someone was able to provide an answer, we should consider ourselves just as buried as the person who has died. Buried in thought and buried in a past that must be accepted, at some point, to be irretrievable. For as we grieve because we hoped we can find a method for bringing everything back, we accept what is gone because grief should not strip remaining life of its movement.

We take along with ourselves their memory. As it is, that is what will always live. Memories live outside of the flesh, accepted as they ought to be in remaining life’s thoughts. What we remember should be, though it is understandable to not always be the case, pleasant moments of them. We ought to remember how they had lived, not how they died, for only the former relates to healing. It stays as a life attached to a life, not death, not grief slowing down the living one whose heart is still capable of loving.