grieving
I got the news that George had died just as I was opening up the shop on the King’s Road. I had seen him the night before. He had been peaceful. I knew that he knew that the end was nigh and that it was something he had not only accepted, he was pleased of.
The days that followed his death, the funeral, all that, remains a blur. Throughout that time, the emotion never caught up with me. The fact of his absence did not connect with a sense of grief.
One day (already chronicled below), not long after the funeral, I went back to Rayner’s Lane for some reason, before their flat was handed over to the landlords. Looked around for a bit at a space devoid of the life that had made it what it was.
Heading back to the tube, I imagine, I stopped to call my mother from an old fashioned phone box. With no warning at all, the emotion caught up with me, and I was in floods of tears.
Emotion is a tricky partner. They say ‘the English’ are unemotional. That ‘we’ hide our feelings, don’t let them out. In my experience, ‘the English’ are no less emotional than anyone else. Even if it might appear so when emotion is not displayed at times it might conventionally be anticipated.
I have a distrust of the notion that emotion should be released at the time you theoretically would expect that release. Emotion works off its own clock. It will choose its own time and place of expression. It could be that the more emotion is managed according to expectation, the more it might be being repressed. Emotion that catches you unawares, that drops from the sky like a falcon, has its place. Its intensity should not be underestimated.
The days that followed his death, the funeral, all that, remains a blur. Throughout that time, the emotion never caught up with me. The fact of his absence did not connect with a sense of grief.
One day (already chronicled below), not long after the funeral, I went back to Rayner’s Lane for some reason, before their flat was handed over to the landlords. Looked around for a bit at a space devoid of the life that had made it what it was.
Heading back to the tube, I imagine, I stopped to call my mother from an old fashioned phone box. With no warning at all, the emotion caught up with me, and I was in floods of tears.
Emotion is a tricky partner. They say ‘the English’ are unemotional. That ‘we’ hide our feelings, don’t let them out. In my experience, ‘the English’ are no less emotional than anyone else. Even if it might appear so when emotion is not displayed at times it might conventionally be anticipated.
I have a distrust of the notion that emotion should be released at the time you theoretically would expect that release. Emotion works off its own clock. It will choose its own time and place of expression. It could be that the more emotion is managed according to expectation, the more it might be being repressed. Emotion that catches you unawares, that drops from the sky like a falcon, has its place. Its intensity should not be underestimated.
posted by maldoror at 12:32 a. m.
2 Comments:
tick-tock tick-tock...
I think its goes the same for someone telling you that you should now be over some grief or other. Perhaps you are forced to carry a particular grief around for a little (or a lot) longer. Its got its own time-scale, grief. A time-scale not to be dicated by others.
Publicar un comentario
<< Home