I have become familiar over the years with much of the writing of the Celtic bard John O'Donohue, but until very recently I was unfamiliar with this poem.
"For Grief" came to me through reading the remarkable journal of my dear friend Betsey Crawford, embedded in her altogether lovely website The Soul of the Earth. I'll always remain struck by and grateful for the circuitousness of the ways gifts come to us, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Betsey wrote:
After reading my last essay, A Year of Love and Death, on the losses of 2020, both personal and worldwide, my brother-in-law sent me a poem by John O’Donohue called For Grief. My partner George’s Irishness was a wild and wonderful force in his life. In the years before his death, he explored Celtic spirituality with his usual exuberance and loved John O’Donohue. So I was doubly moved by the poem, which means more to me every day.
_____________________________________
Now to a few of my own thoughts:
Yes, we've all known it, though it still astonishes me how we can occasionally twist ourselves into misshapen forms of ourselves to avoid our consciousness of it. I'll speak briefly for myself in response to John O'Donohue's poem. (Perhaps you would be well advised to read it first, below.)
I must choose my keenest, most primal examples. There are more, even more than I know or sometimes would admit if I did. When my father died in 1950, aged 50, by throwing himself from an 8th story window of the Weylin Hotel in New York City, I was eleven years old. When my mother died of cancer in the oncology ward of Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, aged 69 in 1975, I was in my mid-thirties. I can recall, in both events, all that of which O'Donohue writes so wisely, albeit from the first as a growing child and sometime student, and from the second, as a growing man and sometime both student and teacher.
In different ways and sometimes the same ways, my life did become strange, my ground fragile. I did speak in unfamiliar, unexpected ways. Loss was indeed a black tide, waxing and waning. I did gain my heart back, by grace and with a lot of hard, recurrent work, not yet done. Though in years I have outlived them, continue to remake a life of my own, as sons and daughters should, my work of grief is not yet done, even as O'Donohue truly says it can be.
Reflect with me on the first word of the title of his poem—For Grief. So grief can be a teacher, a guide, and yes, a blessing. There are those I loved and lost from whom I continue to learn but who do not await my return, though something from them, I'm glad to say, is woven into my life.
For Grief
When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you becomes fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.
Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.
There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.
It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.
Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.