Grief

    Well, this should be a cheerful enterprise.  There isn't a lot of jokes about grief.  There are a few.  I dare you to think of one.  There has been a lot of thought devoted to the subject.  Ya think?  I can't think of anything that so totally consumes the mind.  Love comes close.
    It would be pointless to try to describe or define grief.  It's an intensely personal experience.  Some people never display it even while feeling it.  Others wear it like sackcloth and ashes. There are recognized stages of how people deal with grief. The scale ends with acceptance.  That seems to me to be an acknowledgement it is an open- ended emotion.  That's relatively unique among strong emotions. You can seek and find closure but there's no end.  I suppose that's why it's a frequent dramatic tool.  You'd think it would be easy to not sound completely banal but I'm not havin much luck.
    It would be beyond banal and not informative to relate my own personal experiences with grief.  There are a few, very few things I've seen that inform myself.  By nature, I am a stoic or a hard hearted son of a bitch depending on who you ask.  I'm at an age where I can joke that I have outlived all of my enemies and most of my friends.  Most jokes have more than a kernel of truth.
   One quote I've seen sums up the depth of feeling pretty well:  "We call that person who has lost a father an orphan and a widower a man who has lost his wife.  But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, what do we call him?  Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence." That's just beautiful and you can feel the grief of the 19th-century gentleman who wrote it.
    I've also heard and repeated this quote:  If our parents are very lucky we are all born to be orphans.  I would guess the loss of a parent is the most frequent source of grief.  Just as parents can sometimes be the main source of lesser grief but the loss of a child.  How do you plumb that depth?
    I, one time, had the misfortune to be present when an 80-year-old man was told of the death of one of his sons.  He had 8 adult children.  He turned to his wife of nearly sixty years and said, " I knew we shouldn't have let them move all over the country like that."  As though somehow just proximity would have given them the power to protect their children.  It was the single most poignant expression of grief I've ever heard.  To my knowledge that was his last comment on the subject.  It was literally heart rending and stays with me today some 40 years later.  So simple and direct.
    Well, that about exhausts my store of the obvious on this subject.  The renewal of spring reminded me of the finality of loss and the beauty of perseverance.
    See, I said there were no good jokes in it.