Day Twenty-Seven

The day before the holiday that animates this month-long practice.  If we're traveling may we all be safe, and also mindful of the many others who share the road with us.   Perhaps tomorrow we'll be reunited with people we don't get to see very often.  Reunited and, perhaps, it will feel so good.

And maybe tomorrow our hearts will turn to those who are missing.  Those we have loved who have died. When we look around the table or the room, we don't see them.  And in seeing their absence, there  is sadness.  Wherever we may be in our grief is where we are. Could be that our grief is raw, or is complex, or has been fully integrated into our lives, like one length of fabric in a fuller garment.

For me, my heart opens to my mother who died young and unexpectedly twenty-one Thanksgivings ago. My grief is part of who I am, and fully bound up into my life.  I have often turned to this poem "Late Fragment" by Raymond Carver to help express my experience of mourning.

And did you get what 
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I have always loved those two words "even so"--they're an acknowledgment that life has its sorrows, disappointments and sufferings, that death is an inescapable part of life, and that to know love is to know loss.  And, even so, the poet writes, there still is belovedness. Even so is a grace note that doesn't cancel out the pain of loss, but can contain that loss, and hold it in a grateful loving remembrance.      

If you are missing someone today, who are you missing?  If we're grieving, may we mourn, and may we be comforted.

--Ken