The Wilderness of Suffering

I wish I could report that I'm just ducky, but I'd be lying if I tried to say anything like that. I feel like I'm living in a silent, featureless, and empty wilderness, no matter how many people are walking around or even talking to me, no matter whether I'm in a concert hall, an art gallery, or a subway tunnel. When I am in fact alone, in the apartment, I often cry out in tearful anguish; I'm not sure why or to whom. I don't cry out to God with complaints or rail and rage against the "unfairness" of it all. I just want, at a deeper level of desire than I think I've ever plumbed, to have my life back and to have my wife back, which feel like pretty much the same thing right now, I'm afraid. Oftentimes, I call out for Arabella. This is all pure selfishness, I suppose, but, at this juncture, moral evaluation seems quite beside the point. Others might say that my problem stems from the fact that Arabella and I were too joined at the hip for too long and that I'm paying now for that folie à deux. I've read and heard just this kind of terminology from time to time. To that I'd reply that I would never trade the fierceness of Arabella's and my intimacy for an easier time in dealing with her death... not for a moment. What a stupid notion, which only one deprived of love and loving could ever entertain.

So for now, I go about my business; I teach; I do errands; I keep plodding through financial and domestic papers; I make telephone calls; I go to a few meetings; I attend Mass. I keep thinking that, if I continue to go about my business, at some point things will begin to change, and the wilderness will begin to be re-populated and full of sounds, and colors, and textures once more. However, I'm still waiting for that to happen. In the meantime, it's, well, just the mean-time, with all the possible connotations of that term.

Maybe I don't fully accept the final fact of Arabella's death yet. I don't think that's true, but maybe it is. From one point of view, I know that I have a strong awareness of her as a living presence in my heart and mind and soul. I even rejoice in that as much as ever. However, that doesn't really make me feel better about the present truth of my life, because that presence of which I'm so strongly aware cannot culminate in touch or conversation or laughter or plans for the future. Yes, an awareness of her presence does confirm my faith that death does not have the final word. I feel quite as convinced as ever, really, that God is love and that love, human and divine, never ends. However, that faith does not seem to mitigate the sense of loss and absence.

I suppose that one must simply suffer suffering... otherwise it would not be suffering, but something else, something more easily assimilated, articulated, and borne. I suppose that what makes suffering suffering lies in the fact that there is no mitigation. In that way, the suffering of grief is like pancreatic cancer, and the task, as Arabella taught me, is to walk through it, with my eyes focused on what is possible, not on what is impossible. I will try... but it still hurts so very much. In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis remarked about his wife's death, "Her absence was like the sky, spread over everything." That about says it all for me too.