When grief descends, there is no redemption then in suffering, nothing saving or luminous about it, no higher meaning to its torment, not one gleaning of wisdom or grace. Every moment's pain, like a parody of first love, afflicts for hours, and every day flaunts its eternity. If we could choose our lot, who would not say: Woman, when you see suffering, run, flee from it. But we cannot choose.

In those days a woman would give all she has to get just one thing back. No one wants to learn from pain. When first the ship founders, who thinks of booty? In a catastrophe, who conceives of profit? No, she bewails her fate. Night after night, she reviews her case. Had I even the faintest augury? She compares in stealth her own plight to her neighbors: Surely I've lost the most; all others seem unscathed.

When you meet such a woman, do not speak of inner sustenance, of benefit from sorrow or of healing. Nothing but restoration would suffice, and every day the anguish, rather than abating, multiplies. Do not say that time repairs, or talk of moving forward or of growing. Such consolations are absurd. Offer only this: I, too, have suffered and endured.

A woman who has suffered sees that all the striving in the world, all the material fruits of ardent labor, cannot buy a day's forgetting or one night's peace. She has thrust her fingers into tiny crevices of hope and clutched at the indifferent wall, but when she is compelled to let it go: what a shaming relief to stop trying. In the end, the fiercest love cannot avert the hour of dying.

As slowly as the slowest progression, the infinitesimal turning of the earth, time transports her from that day to this, with many detours, several flagrantly unfair. A month and then a year and then two pass, and it is possible to look back, admit: None of what I've understood replaces what is gone, and yet I have been forced, against my will, to learn. As vehemently as ever I protest the instrument of its acquisition, but I'll not reject a knowledge so hard-won. Now I can begin to use it and forgive the woman I was, pay tribute to her innocence.

This is the teaching of suffering, if you allow it, as if in a great stroke the world you occupy divides itself: Here is what matters; the rest—no.

Like a dancer who offers years of bloodied feet and tender injury toward a gift, a moment of perfect, elusive grace, we proceed through our buffeted lives, trying to make of ill fortune and random blows one small and beautiful thing, which all of us deserve not because of talent or means but simply because we live.

It is the hardest of all learning that the opposite of depression is not happiness—a radiant, receding goal—but vitality, to feel alive each minute you are given. Then when sweetness comes it is most sweet, and when sorrow comes you know its name. In the aftermath of suffering, you chart each day as an explorer preceding map or compass, and what you find is shockingly alloyed: All happiness is dappled, and even bleakest tragedy has moments of strange praise.

GOD CRADLED AND RETREATING

I have been to God:

   a scorned lover, forsaken, like a Victorian heroine ruined by a cad, a broken engagement all she has to show for her unblemished trust;

   an ungrateful daughter, bequeathed an irreplaceable gift, who takes her inheritance for granted until she has squandered it;

   a bitter old woman, cheated of her savings—the confidence in good's prevailing, in love hallowed—left clutching the key to an empty box;

   a despairing cynic, longing for transformation, unable to keep faith;

   a convert, buoyed by the directed passion that believers know;

   a baby, awed that the world can in an instant be made new, when simply to see one thing true is to taste paradise;

   a bestower of blessings in return, thankful for unimagined gifts—love no longer taken for granted, fruitful work, the beauty of the created world.

God has been to me:

   a lover;

   a betrayer;

   a magician;

   a redeemer;

   a confidence man;

   an ample mother;

   a healer;

   a smiter;

   a random punch;

   a scathing judge;

   a cold power;

   a tender light;

In the middle of my days, rent by unsoothed sorrows and remorse, let me reimagine God, translated from the old man of my childhood into a great maternal love, to accommodate somehow the paradox: that every day such horrors transpire we should all take our lives, and yet the giving and receiving of love is so high a consolation we go on.

The questions the ancients asked still obtain: Why do some reap rich reward and others die barren? How can a creator allow the creatures to suffer so? How can believers murder the image of God in the body of another? How can a world rife with desecration be made whole?

SOLILOQUY

I never held her hand. I never called the last week of her life. I meant to make the trip and then postponed it. I said some words I never can take back.

   If only I had known.
      (Ah, but you didn't.)

   If only I had thought.
      (But you could not.)

   Why didn't I once tell you?
      (But I knew it.)

   Why didn't I invite you?
      (Never mind.)

   I hated you for growing weak, for dying.
      (I absolve you.)

   I lie awake remembering how I failed you.
      (How I love you.)

   For the rest of my life, I never—
      (Only love.)

   How could I—?
      (Don't you know you are forgiven?)

   If only—
      (Would you want your child to live with such reproaches?)

   No, I say reluctantly, I would not.
      (Then forgive yourself. If only I could ask you, that is what I'd ask.) ‹ 




From A Woman's Book of Grieving by Nessa Rapoport (New York: William Morrow & Sons, 1994). Used by arrangement with the author.
Copyright © 1994 by Nessa Rapoport. Do not reproduce without author's permission. All rights reserved.