What is left to say
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The blank page waits. My turn in the rotation has come again, and now has passed. My post will be one day late. The blank page waits.
I feel like I should have something profound to share. Some brilliant nugget mined from my ten-plus-years grief experience, hauled up to the surface and polished, polished, polished until it gleams with the beauty of reflection, time, wisdom. Something that will help another griever. The distillation of ten years’ without her into some simple truth about how much she mattered and is missed – how much they all matter and are missed.
The blank page waits. How does one mourn just one body, and such a small one, and after so many years, in the face of the fathomless losses of these last years: pandemics, wars, mass shootings, poisoned drugs, climate crisis. What is there left to say about this one sorrow, this singular (and infinite) grief? I fall more and more silent, watching the numbers of the dead rise and rise, as of course they do, but years of daily deathcounts on the news, numbers of bodies buried in mass graves, migrants sunk at sea, lives lost to flooding, heat waves, cold snaps, the threat even, again, of nuclear war. What is there left to say? The blank page waits.
The words used to flow. I poured them out on page after page, in journals, on blogs, in forums, here, there, where they were wanted, where they were not. They leaked out everywhere like the tears that used to run down my cheeks just standing in line at the coffee shop, walking the grocery aisles, picking her sister up from school. The desperate urge to scream her name into every space and force them, the non-bereaved, to acknowledge that she lived and died, was here, is gone, spewing out in all these urgent words and heedless tears.
The words and tears dry up. It really is like a wound, healing. For days, months, years, I walked around with an open, oozing sore, yelling my pain, unable to be comfortable, making a mess. And then – slowly – the skin grew back. I picked at the scab til it bled again, but it grew back, over and over, until now, from the outside at least, the sore is healed. No one sees it. No one asks how the pain is. Everything is sealed up. The words and tears are sealed up, too.
I’m sitting at a restaurant with two friends, ordering cocktails, giddy with the way it feels normal to be doing this, to be together, in pretty dresses, choosing from the list of gorgeously-described drinks. One contains macerated fruit. My mind stutters on that word: macerated. It was in her autopsy report. I had to look it up. I know it now. Stutter stutter stutter. The scar itches. I give it a gentle rub. I know it’s there. I choose a different drink. My friends smile and laugh and I shove the word back down.
What is there left to say? The blank page waits.
What do you most want to say? What can’t you say? What words do you wish you said?