“This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”
I try to live for all of the beauty in the world. But on days when that fails me and I fall back into the ravine, I think it’s fine to keep on living out of spite.
“Disability is an ambiguous loss, which makes it trickier. The losses aren’t always obvious. If someone is still working, still has a family, or is still alive, people tell them to be grateful for what they have instead of supporting them. People try to force a happy face on them when they aren’t ready for it, because ours is a very grief-phobic culture. Nobody can tell someone how to grieve or how long to grieve.”
To grieve is to mourn a loss. While it is hard to view this loss as anything but subjective, there is also some beauty in this. The upside to grieving is the appreciation it can give to you for what you haven’t lost. Hermann Hesse writes, “we fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear.”
My doctor lost his wife earlier this year. He was heartbroken, yet each week I see him things get a little bit better. This past week when I came for my weekly visit I asked him about his weekend. He told me how he had flown to California to visit his son and grandson and went camping for the first time in his life. When I asked him how he found it he told me the most beautiful thing about it was the mornings. Waking up on the foam mattress in the tent, hearing the condensation on the fabric drip down onto the forest floor, sitting out in the foggy morning, and cooking up breakfast on the open fire. He looked happy. A kind of happiness maybe he wouldn’t have been able to experience if he was still spending each minute taking care of his wife as she was dying of cancer.
I am sick. I am grieving the sickness that I have to live with for the rest of my life. This past week I focused on all of the things that I have lost - my freedom, my energy, my health. But, at the end of the day it is easy for me to think about the life I have and reassuringly know that it could be worse.
It’s bittersweet. To know the pain of what you have lost while appreciating the beauty you have around you. It almost can drive you to guilt, that you should grieve for longer, or abstain from life when it isn’t the way it once was. But this would be a disservice to all that grief can give to us. Maybe it is possible to not treat grief as an obstacle to our happiness. Perhaps we should view loss as the disability and grief as the accommodation. There is beauty in it. Especially, when we can appreciate what it has given to us in addition to what it may take.
It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (via valsedelesruines)
![shi-saa:
“Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
[originally published 1929]
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