#the blessing

When someone you love dies suddenly, the process of surviving them is complex. Part of the difficulty is separating out your entangled identities. Grieving, you celebrate the love bond between you and the dead one, but also, as you grieve, you are distinguishing yourself from the dead one.

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When I imagine healthy grieving, I see the living one packing a little boat with clothes and food and mementos. The dead one climbs into the boat and when the time for departure comes, you send him on his voyage into his new life. You, the living, stand on the shore and watch as the lost loved one rows out into the dark alone.

No one spoke to me about Peter’s dying. No one told me how to help my little brother on his journey to the land of the dead; no one showed me how to bless him and let him go. No one offered to help me sort out the threads of memory and guilt and grief that confused our two identities into a single tangle. I did my best. It felt as if I sat for hours on the floor of my room, trying to separate out our two selves, but I could not—it was hopeless. And so I gave up and thrust the whole snarl back inside my body, back through my own wound that had opened when Peter died. From then on, Peter and I were inextricable in my thoughts. He became a part of me and lived inside me more intimately mingled than warp and woof of the same cloth, basic and mysterious as the place where the pale blue of veins meets the scarlet of arteries. 

Gregory Orr, from “After,” The Blessing: A Memoir (Council Oak Books, 2002)