I haven’t had words of late. The page, ready and available, has remained blank despite time and opportunity. And just cause.
Words, it turns out, are close akin to heartbeats, breaths, and those, too, have been hard to come by. My eyes have been, alone, on my feet putting one step in front of the other. Simply moving forward has been full-time effort. One step at a time. And then the next one. Grief, I have feared, has stolen my vocabulary. Since the death of my dad July 11 I have been unable to will the words. Absent my own, then, but reaching for something, I have snatched evocative images from around the farmstead and borrowed the words of others.
But even limp, monosyllabic words, I am observing, eventually leak out; finally uncontainable, like the tears that dissolved them these recent weeks. And so these tentative, mostly guttural sounds; closer to the scriptures’ “sighs too deep for words,” but for the first time in recent weeks, more than nothing. And almost audible. After all this silence, all this barely outlined silhouette, I am beginning to hear the notes and see, again the colors. I am beginning to breathe, and finally to form some tentative words.
Be patient with me, then, as I am having to be with myself. There are things I need to say - recollections, affirmations, gratitudes and insights. There are emotional contours I need to trace, and new beginnings I need to sketch of life on different terms. But it is slow. As I recently confessed to a trusted friend, I look forward to the hope, thus far unrealized, of discerning Daddy’s presence in new and more gossamer ways, than simply the broken and jagged ramparts of his absence.
I can just make out the edges of the village of voice just around the bend, but I have not yet gotten near enough to locate its gates. They will open, I trust, soon enough, and I will part my lips and risk a word. And perhaps, then, another. And then we will just have to see what the hot sadness has been emulsifying that only now, with cooler perspective, can settle out.
