Hot Fudge, Sprinkles and Grief.
But mostly Grief.
Last night we stood in line for ice cream at our favorite spot. It was New England-style summer with an offshore breeze and it was busy.
A man stood in line parallel to us, shaking with rage at the amount of time it took for the couple ahead of him to pay, to get their cones, to circle back for a napkin. He was swearing under his breath, exasperated in his movements, flickering around the edges like a flame, but not warm.
This display was making people uneasy, it defied our social conventions of niceties. You could see parents side-eyeing the situation, giving room, and others assessing the level of danger. The instinct to judge this behavior is correct. His reaction was out of proportion with the circumstances. We all have to wait our turn.
When the initial bristle of threat had passed, I found myself feeling the edges of this man for his humanity.
I found myself wanting to pass my ice cream off and walk over and place my hand on his shoulder. I wanted to take his hand into mine and draw him gently to the ground, where I could take his chin in my palm, hold his gaze, and tell him just how sorry I am that life is so hard right now, maybe it always had been. I wanted to let him shake and cry until he could soften into a man who could let someone get an extra napkin. I wanted him to breathe and sputter and collapse into the heart that knows it was never really about a napkin.
It was grief in the way that it is all grief and has always been grief. It is grief in the way that being a human is an odd mixture of always saying hello or goodbye. It is grief in the way that underlines our ground of being.
I read once in a children’s book about the Greek idea that in the beginning, people were two halves of one whole, stuck together with another. We had twenty toes and fingers, four arms and legs, and the mates to our souls shared our breathing and our bodies. They wrote that Zeus had ripped us apart to keep us from becoming gods ourselves. It sounds like a romantic idea, that we are all searching and seeking our companions so we can feel fully ourselves. It feels romantic until you let the idea rest for a while and you understand that they are explaining the exquisitely painful human condition of separateness. In philosophical language, this is nestled in the idea of Ontological Loss.
I haven’t written in a little while because I have been trying to touch my own edges of grief, how I could even begin to encompass what grief has meant to me, or how I could even try to put to words how much grief I see in others. This is a start but barely a beginning.
There is something about the path of descent, the path of grief and darkness, that brings awareness to the suffering of others. Once you decide to stop resisting and feel your own suffering, you can’t seem to stop seeing the ways everyone else is suffering. It is the exact opposite of the ascent of spirituality, rather than taking you out of pain, it parks you right inside it. It is the difference between soil and sky. It is excruciatingly present. It is individual but also collective. We are all heaving in the pains of what could be but isn’t.
Our world feels ripped apart by division, which is just different flavors of grief. Some trying to take us to a magical place where there is no suffering, and some trying to bring us back to an imagined time of less suffering. This is just unmet grief and it is folly. It is like we were promised heaven and we got Earth and we have yet to reconcile our disappointment.
This separation has only increased as we have moved from a higher power that we believed would walk through the Garden with us, who remained close enough to knock on our tent or live in our temples, to a God who lives in a chatbox and looks like a screen. Almost every culture has a Garden myth because there is a universal hope that there must have been a time when people didn’t hurt like this. There has to be an explanation for all this suffering, otherwise we grieve in vain.
We are all feeling the weight of being alone in our minds. We are all saying “This isn’t how it was meant to be” in the native tongue of our behavior.
We are buying and eating and drinking and drugging and yelling and honking and swearing and labeling and we are really hurting and heaving and crying and…grieving.
There are so many kinds of death, death of a relationship, death of a person, death of dreams, death of identity, death of certainty, and death of ideas of a safe or just world. Death of the idea that good decisions will make a life free from suffering. Death that we could never outrun the fact that we live inside this body alone.
It’s like a watercolor painting of what could have been, should have been, but isn’t.
The problem isn’t the grief but the trying to bear it alone.
That being said, to the collective, I would like to bring my hand to your shoulder. I would like to cup my hand around your chin and look right into your eyes and tell you how sorry I am that life is so hard. As mercy herself, I would like to let you lean into me while you cry from the depth of your intestines for every moment that you needed love and instead felt pain. As justice, I would like to let you storm against me until you can soften the candle wax of cortisol around your heart into the cosmic joke of unfairness. As wisdom, I would like to help you hold the tension of this moment of what it means to be alone, just like everyone else. As love, I would like to tell you that you are always loved, you just forgot to remember.
As the mother, I would like to take you out for ice cream on a sticky summer night and give you two scoops with hot fudge and sprinkles and extra napkins, my treat. Cause some things only ice cream can fix.
❤️
It’s a great skill you’re practicing to be able to see past the anger and rage in another person. Very hard thing to do.