Grieving

Grieving is essentially forgetting.

The human mind is this unwieldy ball of complex mechanisms, with its’ gears and engine-like emissions and tell-all chapters and trapdoors that are right out there in plain sight. There are lots and lots of highly trained specialists, many more than the nine-months-from-now appointments might suggest, who’ve told us that, and who have ridiculously complex visual aids to back up said claims. The idea that these persons are just in it for the money doesn’t hold, given that their student loan debts must be literally crushing. So I believe them. Yet the mind also has a few tools that are just as blunt and as simple as they need to be, and one of those tools is forgetting things. A perfect example: women who have more than one child. Why on earth would they want to split themselves in half that more than once? And the fathers: do they want to wake up again after an insufficiently refreshing three hours of sleep just so they could wipe shit from a baby’s ass for fifteen minutes, then have to wake up again in a half hour to argue with someone about who’s turn it is to get up and do it again? So we forget what it was like, for the good of the species. It’s gotten us far. We forget how many times an experiment’s failure made us fill with despair and alienate our loved ones, and so we persevere and invent vaccines. We also carry on and keep trying until we create the first viable pair of downhill skis, because it’s a joyous thing to do, and we’re intent on seeding that joy anywhere snowy and steep enough. Perhaps it’s gotten us too far: we can see unspoiled wilderness and forget that it’s there for a reason and that last time we tore it down for the plywood there were dire consequences.

 Forgetting is simple and powerful. Grieving is forgetting. When someone dies, most bereaved people hear that time will heal, which is true because they will forget the awful shit about the dead person, or the awful shit that the dead person did to them, out of self-defense, which is the best offense, species-wise. We do forget things about our dead, no matter how many scrapbooks we make or how many times we get really drunk on that person’s favorite scotch. We just do- it’s like breathing or copulating. The only thing that will bring some memories back is a specific smell, but then we’ll forget what the smell was, then that there was a memory attached to something we’d smelled in the first place. We’re doomed and blessed to forget: doomed because of the obvious doomy things, and blessed because forgetting clears up space for us to use cherishing the good stuff, or at least the stuff that taught us something. Ideally it’s the good. I can conjure images and words that make me feel bad about how I was afraid of my father because he was booming and terse when angry, but what I remember is his love of be-bop jazz and his bad jokes and how happy he was to be around me and my mother and sister.

This is for my Dad and my father-in-law and everyone else I’ve lost. Mostly, though, it’s for my friends who have just lost someone in their immediate families. You’ll forget soon, except for a few things- and that’ll be better.