Monday, April 24, 2006

A Semi-Private Conversation...

In reading Woltorstorf last fall I knew I was being informed about things that I would only later develop a deeper understanding of. (In case you don't remember, he wrote a collection of ruminations on grief after his son passed away. It's called Lament For a Son and was the best book on grief I read.) Such was, and is, the case with his thoughts that grief brings people together but it also, because everyone experiences it in different ways, alienates those same people who are together.

I am experiencing this to be true and the possible culprit in the general funk I found myself in today. I know what I am feeling and thinking about Kyle and his life and death. I also know how those feelings affect me and what they do to my general mood. But what I don't know are the myriad of ways that you have thought about Kyle today and what those thoughts do to you. You could share and I could share and we may even cry a bit and laugh some and talk about what it means to us , to be living in a world without Kyle, but in the end, for all of us, it is still a deeply personal experience.

These are difficult waters to wade through-- living in the tension between what this all means to us, and what it means to you, and what it means to me. To make it through we all must have a sense of trust in each other. But trust in what? I must trust that you will see the sacredness of this grief-experience going on within me, and that you will tread cautiously and handle with care. And in turn I must earn your trust by treating your grief-experience with the same amount of caution and care.

I shared this with some the other night, but now everyone should know: Although the tears become less frequent and dissilusion has turned into vision, albeit cloudy, in many ways the easy part is over and the hard part has begun. The adrenaline has faded and all we have left is what we choose to give each other. Let's give each other our trust and our continued presence.

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