TALKING TO THE DEAD

I’m thinking of my friend Michael a lot today.  It will be a year this Saturday that his beloved wife and my friend Kate died.  I have always said grief takes a year based on my own experience and what my mother told me.  I think it is going to take Michael longer.  I certainly don’t know how he feels because my partner is alive, but every-time I think about him I tap into this unbelievable ocean of grief.  Its so powerful I have to will myself away from it.  My own experience with grief has made me very awed by it.  Far more powerful than anger yet I think you can make friends with it somehow.  I am reminded of  “Torch Song Trilogy”. Arnold  Ma… I miss him.
: Ma: Give yourself time, Arnold. It gets better… But, Arnold, it never goes away. You can work longer hours, adopt a son, fight with me, whatever… it’ll still be there. But that’s all right, it becomes a part of you, like learning to wear a ring or a pair of eyeglasses. You get used to it. And that’s good. It’s good, because it makes sure you don’t forget. You don’t want to forget him, do you? 

I think I do this by talking to the dead.  I talk to my dead relatives while I wash the dishes in the morning.  Yes, they talk back.  I don’t know if it is really their spirits or my memories of them, but it gives me comfort.  I talk to Kate when I am looking at “big girl dresses”  at Savers, but only the Savers on Lake Street.  The other Savers is in the suburbs. Yes she talks back.  She has talked me into somethings and out of somethings.  Is it her?  is it my memory of her? does it matter?  It makes me feel better.  It makes me remember her.  She is one of the dead who walk with me.  She is too large in spirit to be a pair of glasses she is more like a flowing orange and purple robe.

Talking to the dead, I recommend it.