Grief

“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
― Ellen Bass


Interestingly, this quote showed up on a friend's Facebook page yesterday.  And, here today, we grieve.  I sit in the wake of this ugliness in Aurora, CO, and the poem quoted, which seemed so knowing and haunting just a day ago in a removed sort of way, hangs heavier than it did yesterday, so much heavier.  I ache for those whose bodies have to withstand this unbearable, this weighted and raw agony.  I pray from some deep place for every family, even for James Holmes and his sad family.  I long, in that way we all do, for the impossible--the ability to turn back time and refuse to allow the event.


As a mother, this sadness is like a kick in the stomach.  I watched an interview this morning with a young man who had taken his little sister and his girlfriend to see the new Batman movie last night.  It's not that his story was chilling that made me hurt so much for him, rather, that he is not the same person he was when he walked into the theater.  And he never will be.


I ask everyone reading this to stop just now, and pray.  Pray for an unmistakable holiness in and around each person.  Pray that each broken heart would mend, and that each person will one day be able to take life between the palms and "say, yes, I will take you/I will love you, again."