Metaphors and Statements of Fact

C. S. Lewis, in his tome A Grief Observed, begins with the line: “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.”

Fair enough. Grief can feel that way, like fear, like a beast that grips you, holds you down or shakes you until your limbs fall numb. Sometimes, grief is a rhino charging at you unexpectedly, triggered abruptly by some uncultivated gesture, or impelled by a single word spoken by someone else in an otherwise meaningless conversation, maybe a word mispronounced, one that makes me think about how Uyen said “dat” instead of “that,” when she spoke too fast.

Sometimes, grief is the face of your loved one, somehow fashioned there in a display of gala apples at the grocery and turned silver when struck by halide light at an angle certain. On occasion, grief is a smile when you recall the time your love sat laughing amid a newly discovered patch of huckleberries in the rarified mountain light of an early morning with a soft halo of tiny insects swirling above her. Grief is watering the parched geranium early on Sunday morning. On bad days, grief is liquid poured over all that you touch. Grief is a solid core lodged inside you. Grief is an elephantine construction that is both tenuous and tenacious at the same time. Grief is your own child, following you from place to place. Grief is clear and cold is glacier ice, hot and obtuse as black pavement bathed in the desert sun. Grief is both broken and fixed. Grief is the diet upon which we starve.

Grief is my beautiful wife standing where a fence splits the springtime landscape in two. In one hand, she holds aloft a gathering of lupine and mule’s ear. In the other hand, she holds the sun. I swear to you, grief is hope and salvation, because grief is the name of the place where we begin—where I begin—anew.

--Mitchell Hegman