I cease to offer condolences for death. Nor do I pour bourbon sauce over bread pudding. In public. I have not done either since 2009, the year that my mother departed this plane - ostensibly for cosmos a smidge more cheeky.
I cannot sign the ‘greeting’ card. Something’s off about that “sympathy” in dramatic cursive font. The way both ‘y’ letters loop around some flower that droops. Flora depressed. Just so. Something like Devil’s Trumpet maybe.
Sympathy means well yet can wind up tooting its own horn, only further wilting petals. Sympathy may imply at least an aspect of pity. I do not pity the act nor state of grieving. Instead, I honor the bereaved as entering a realm damn near divine. I am too much in awe of grief.
And “sorry for your loss”. That - too - seems politely obligatory at best. I am neither ‘sorry’ nor do I estimate a loved one’s passing as ‘loss’. The pain of/in grief is pristine. Appeasing it is a gesture wasted. I fear perfunctory extensions can only be expressed to the detriment of genuine engagement. When it is never more required. While platitudes are readily dispensed, perhaps that brief window - where our vulnerability matches our imagination - is unwittingly shut. The ‘standards’ are reliable in saving us from ourselves, preventing unintentional slights from the aahkward risks of authenticity. Might benign refrains, though, prune back more bark than necessary? Albeit inadvertently, does sincerity - high polished - endanger the health of empathy?
I avoid the convention. Knowing what I now know. Continuing on. Heeding the gift of grieving for either parent. My father’s transition, in 2017, followed my mother’s exit - nigh quantum condensing those eight years. Given such familiarity, any condolence ‘moratorium’ may sound like a cruel withholding. My stance is the converse of indifference; it is the most compassion that I can muster. I have found no other experience in our existential canon which succinctly introduces one to oneself. With so graceful a blow, in a delivery unnerving as unwavering. There is pure gold in grief. The sting of bourbon to boot. How can we be ‘sorry’ for meeting ourselves in that manner? It is less ‘loss’ than incalculable gain.
I came to this insight upon my knees. Literally. One goes about their days in grief. In grey. In the aftermath that stretches from hours to days to weeks, one endures in infinite demarcations of grey. Fifty shades is supposedly kinky. Surpassing that, grief unveils finer greys of distinction: some lined in silver, others in dark smoke before or after flames. No fires to extinguish. Not exactly. Not when one fancies oneself too enlightened for denial. Which basically translates to the hypocrisy of the lateral promotion to keeping one’s distance. From burning...alive. Distant from the inconceivable, fluctuations seem minor, if not minuscule. For some time, there is no color, no heat nor cold. The palette of mourning is merciless in its delicate streams of grey.
Too cynical for too many tears, my body expresses sadness of its own accord. Tongue loses its taste for bourbon sauce on bread pudding. In public. Shock makes my knees give way. Rarely occurs. Which is why I was stunned to sink to my floor one grey day. Literally. My knees buckled. Down I went. My vertical illusion toppled into truth. I figure the grey had become so numbing that my own bottom fell out beneath me. I quickly ascertained that I could not rise. The weight of grief had rendered me unable to stand. Until an insight emerged.
Still blinking dry grey: “Oh, I think I may ‘get’ it.” And what I deemed that I got? There is no love that can qualify itself sans mourning. None. This precise moment is testimony to the breadth of true love. My grief is directly proportional to the love shared. When one has loved as fiercely as the flawed do and as courageously as the cowardly dare. This is how deeply, I surmised, one human can touch another, how their presence can be ensconced in the nooks and crannies of a conscience. When an intimacy that elaborate is physically severed, time and space collapse in on oneself, propelling one into the bowels of the human experience. “Alright,” I managed to think. For this ‘low’ was indeed right by all account, intrinsically apt, errors correct as Nikki is hip. The thought had not hatched betwixt synapses nor even an epiphany via gut. The closest one may attempt to articulate such awareness is not a feeling or notion - so much - as the clarity of what it means to feel at all. Plunging the depths of grief? How I felt! As never felt. Grief felt eerily alive. That is the dire effect of a beloved’s physical absence. I was astounded by the realization that in my brokenness, because of my brokenness, I had never been more human. Therefore, I had never been more whole. Wholly human. Hence, my broke ass rose.
I do not know how I knew to adopt an immediate reverence for how raw I was then. It struck me as sacred to never have been this close to the bone of being, all nerve endings…beginning. All cracks fourteen karat. Kintsugi or “golden joinery” is the Japanese art of exposing cracks. A broken pitcher or dessert plate is not only glued back together but every crack - or at least the discernible - is deliberately emphasized in kintsukuroi or “golden repair”, traditionally with actual gold sealant. Sunlight thru grey clouds. Sauce buttery on crust bubbling.
The mere claim upon a ‘broken heart’ seems to grant permission to focus on our individual trauma to the exclusion of life all around - still breathing and thereby teaching. That idea had sunk me; it caved in my knees. Once acknowledging the intensity of my immense humanness, I wondered if a heart breaking beckons more from us. Rather than less. Can we center the obvious circumstance of the maddening breaking while allowing the otherwise elusive heart to keep on cracking, encouraging its regal rifts? Like asphalt during an earthquake - a breaking that runs under every house on the block. None ‘escape’ unscathed. Can we invite ourselves to be as broken open as our sanity will bear? Cognizant of fragility - also cracking - all around. Does the focus, then, shift from the crux of our pain to the fact that we are in that very suffering because of a humanity exalted? Humanity by the name of beauty-breaking-wide. Core exposed: that of our rather crooked mutuality, worthy of cringe holistic. Where fragility cannot decipher excitement from devastation. When bourbon is sweet or sour. Whether to devour pudding in private.
My heart had not been broken by my mother’s passing; it was shattered beyond recovery. My heart was better for having been blown to bits. Albeit the pacing was in stages excruciating as exhilarating. Veins running untamed, puzzle-pieced mapping for the flow of primordial drunken goo. My mother’s death birthed emotions brand new and old ones bear stretch marks from having been pushed past reason. Grief is designed to rearrange us thus. The inhabitant of a cocoon does not get her groove back. She is interStella. Restoration is not the business of metamorphosis. Whether buried in ashes of phoenix or lining slime encasing chrysalis, that past heart - a before snapshot of heart - aches from soggy wings yet to form.
My longing for my mother is not typified in the usual milestones - with gratitude for the unique diversion. I dig that I miss her most in the suspension of bourbon sauce for bread pudding. Liquified mettle halts its spill, waiting to fill potholed brioche.
My mother had a wicked sense of humor, naughtier than most suspected - a side to her that the few ingratiated enjoyed to its hilt. She did not make bread pudding; she ordered it, exceeding her delight when appearing on a menu. If properly as decadently served with that demi creamer of bourbon sauce, she was unconsolable in her glee. When her bliss tipped the scales, her humor turned ‘blue’ as balls. Yes, those kind. (That sentence sighs…writ especially for her.) Bread pudding was one thing. Bourbon sauce, though? She would beam beyond measure. Meg Ryan’s faked orgasm in Katz Deli, from When Harry Met Sally, was all but forgotten, an inferior blur, lost in shadows of my mother’s unabashed display.
I abandoned bread pudding eons ago. For survival, I become gluten-free in the early-to-mid-nineties, before the cool kids took to the deprivation for sport. I confess to scant patience for this current incarnation of gluten-excised folk. I regret detecting an obnoxious element amongst some that makes my intestinal rebel fantasize about taking up saltine crackers again. Only this time, to avenge us - we, the calm fringe of the gluten ‘intolerant’ cabal - I would pulverize saltines. To a fine dust. To dust. Then, slap down the stiffest square. Of ravioli unstuffed. After pounding it flatter, I would roll up that pasta, tight, like a dollar bill. To snort lines of pure grade saltine powder off the zaftig abs on the Pillsbury Doughboy. (Another pause…poignantly for her. How else to get a subversive angel her wings?)
I have landed somewhere inadequate. Oh, not the above paragraph. That tried to pay homage to one far more masterful in inappropriate utterance. Her timing alone. With that nonchalant tone once she had lulled your expectation dim - confusing her for some dame prim. The gluten factor is no excuse either as bourbon sauce works wonders on a baked apple. That is not the point. There is simply no mortal upon the planet who can pour bourbon sauce at her level of expertease. My late mother’s bourbon sauce pour was classic burlesque yet original enough to earn retirement. Poor replication of her pour might prove insulting, offending two deities: god of brioche pastry and goddess of burlesque pastie.
I refer more here to my ineptitude when speaking to others along their mourning journeys. I insist, nonetheless, upon speaking, no matter how words - like ashy knees - wobble. Illicit moonshine in lieu of sanctioned refined bourbon, my compassion is potentially combustible: “Grief is such a sacred process. I wish you grace with it.” I tend to stop there. For my nod is no condolence; I bow to grief’s anointing.
Comfort with acquaintance can occasionally lend itself to hazarding a lingering - on the sly: “I wish you gentleness with yourself. I hope you define grief on your terms and believe that not one crumb brushed or nibbled on your path to healing is wrong. I hope you know you are an expert in your emotions. Which honors your beloved.” That phrasing cannot encompass how much I wish to soothe. Let empathy ooze, drown, soak the edges of a sticky square of…left…over…daily bread, defer its fall from Langston’s golden raison while sliding slow into shards of plate - a syrupy sweet - mending rupture.
What I do not share - as such is not mine to assert: “I hope you find peace with grief. Because it never ends. If not ignored but nurtured, it can evolve to a place where you can live and even flourish. Getting past it is futile; it is your new ‘normal’. Old you? Gone. That you was taken with them. The nascent you, though, is the ‘present’ they leave. They left you to encounter.”
Ain’t hardly my place to suggest the rest: “Consider your teeth to free the knot wrapping your ‘present’. Unravel ribbon, biting thru packaging called etiquette. May forks full of broken-parted beauty satisfy. May your own torn pieces inspire you. May you be carried upon these fragments of your former self becoming else. Your scraps, spellbound, might barely stay afloat. As in a bumpy magic carpet ride. On all fours. Welcome the arrival of this uncut jeweled you. If inclined, savor what is jagged as jarring - eschewing smooth assumed too early. May that urn in your palm split. From the force of sauce to spare as you pour forth with erotic flare...how. How much you love."
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