"Lines After M. B.'s Funeral"

I keep trying to find the words, but this is perhaps a case of feeling too much and so being able to say too little. Ironic, isn't it, that where we care most we can express least? I'm reaching for letters, for sounds, trying to speak, but they're escaping me again; there are tears in my eyes, but shedding them is out of the question, shedding them would be a waste. There's a hole in the world. I'm afraid I might fall through. So instead I shuffle from market to kitchen to room and to kitchen again, seeking solace in mugs of tea almost too hot to drink and writing sympathy cards via dishes of food, because what can I say? What can I say? Someone has died, was, has gone, is where?  

The cry of the South-flying geese sounds almost too desolate and wild to be borne, and the silence wreaks havoc in its wake only because somewhere else, amidst the noise and clamour of life too loudly enacted, fragile people are stuffing trembling, over-white fists into their open mouths and asking soundlessly if they can go on, because my God, this is too much for us; can't You let us be? Tragedies are folded and laid by with years past, and referenced calmly, but only when the wounds are allowed to heal and then scar. What about when there is no scarring—when there cannot be—because the blows are laid so heavily and swiftly that the blood cannot even be staunched? This is neither the first nor the only time that space has opened. We are riddled with death like a sieve.

Is it easier when there is time to adjust to the morphing of eager hope into horror? Is it easier when the emotional battle can be fought in the privacy of a darkened bedroom instead of beneath glaring lights, amidst strangers? Is it easier to divide one's dreams from one's reality and lock those fantasies carefully away than it is to sign life away on a multitude of forms and carry death home wrapped in a hospital blanket.

How many times can a heart die before it stops beating?

The dark holes are as multitudinous
As the stars in the galaxies,
As open to the cold blasts of wind.
If we fell through,
What would we find?

Where is the mercy in this beating? Well-meaning people speak vaguely of pruning; is the definition of pruning truly laying waste?

The reading of The Year of Magical Thinking was serendipitously timed, I cannot help thinking with some bitterness. Now I can cling to it as a manual for grief. As a blueprint for how to be present without being burdensome. As a prescription to allow, if diligently taken, living with death.

I didn't want a manual. I wanted to pause and be still, be silent, and then move on from reading about one woman's pain to sharing in other women's rejoicing.

I wanted life.

Life is not stillness beneath my hands or static reverberating from a Doppler. Life is not a flat line on a fetal heart monitor. Life is not "Two children still living, two dead."

What is the point of this?

If we fell through
What would we find?
Show me
Let me look through this new empty place
To where
The wind comes from
And the light begins.