Darling Pam,
Grief is the cost of loving someone. Bonding gives us the motivation to believe that when our loved ones leave us, it is temporary, and they will return. If we truly believed that they would not return every time they left the house, our life might be unbearable. The Grieving Brain p60
Last night I had the most delightful dinner with the Schearers and the Hallifields. It was time spent with good friends, recalling good times we’d had spent together and commenting upon how you did or would react to matters of life, it was utterly delightful.
I am working my way through the field of Magical Thinking to the point that my brain is becoming more aware that you are not returning. Still, the triggers of recollections often times come fast and furiously.
Much more than when I first read it, I can now relate to what CS Lewis penned in A Grief Observed: “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling, action after action, had (my wife) for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to (my wife) I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.”
Like Lewis, so many thoughts lead me to so many experiences we shared, but as my mind goes there, I realize they exist no more.
This, I find myself wondering, will last for how long?
Unlike Dr O’Connor, I do not believe the pathways established in my brain are the evolutionary process of foraging for food and then finding my way back to the cave to my family at days end.
We both possess a certain awe over the magnificence and beauty of the human body, but I believe, rather than evolution, these are the gift of God. The here, now and close function of my brain has not happened by chance, it is the design of our maker. It allows me the process of saying goodbye; it allows me the ability to love the many ways you were created in God’s image and bore that image before me, a reminder of his grace.
I will go throughout my days, cherishing these moments, not dreading them, even as they diminish in frequency, they are reminders of God’s faithfulness and our faithfulness to each other.
I love you darling.
Brad
You may note the gap of a letter. It is written, but I had to edit my thoughts in letter 4