Mourning

          I had thought mourning was active, something you did: You threw your hair over your head and keened. You wept and wore black clothes. Your heart felt like stone, and there was an ache that hurt like a knife. Nothing was untouched by the pall of grief.

          Yes, but no. I find instead that mourning is like the sympathetic nervous system: it is a thing of its own and doesn't need my active participation. It is constant, and it is occasional. It hits hard, and it rides easy.

          I had dreaded the mourning of my first wedding anniversary, May 18, given that my husband had died only eleven days earlier, so a few days before, I threw myself into a project of putting together a wall of photographs of Mike during the time I knew him:

choosing them, printing them, framing them, arranging them, hanging them. I had pictures from many hikes; of us at Mt. St. Helen's, at Crater Lake, in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy, on the green-sand beach in Hawaii, in the redwoods, at the ocean. There were honeymoon pictures from the northern California coast; touristy pictures from Aix-en-Provence and Croatia; pictures of Mike and me skiing. There were beautiful pictures from his illness (see post on April 30) and from our stupendous wedding on the Applegate River. It was a wonderful project, bringing back memories that had me rejoicing, which, in the end, might be a part of mourning, too.

           Thinking it would mitigate mourning, I invited all the 150 wedding guests to light a candle for Mike and me in honor of our anniversary and to post a picture of it on Google Photos. All day photos of candles were coming in. I felt surrounded by light and love. Candles were lit on the Applegate River, at the wedding site.

Photos were taken of candles with the wedding invitation,

with flowers, with paintings, with hands,

and with special effects for Mike and me. I saw that doing this for us was a way for others to mourn Mike's passing while they also rejoiced in our life together.

          On that day, too, three good friends came over for lunch. They asked for stories about the photographs. We talked about the wedding, and they asked about Mike's three weeks on hospice and what that was like for me. It was good to talk about it. Grief is worse suffered in silence. They listened to all 35 poems I had written during those weeks. Far from a day of mourning, it was a day of remembering and sharing and a spreading of love. 

          But maybe that is also what mourning is.

          In general the mornings are the worst, after I wake up from a night of dreams, mostly jumbled and confused, which I think is another kind of mourning. When I woke up the day after my anniversary feeling desolate and empty, I thought to hike the East Applegate Ridge Trail, that Mike and I had hiked with a small group of out-of-town wedding guests the day after our wedding. I imagined myself hiking with tears flowing, given the emotions attached to the hike, but once I set out on the trail, my spirits lifted, instead. As with the photographs and reading the poems, the memories became uplifting. The wildflowers were as beautiful this year as they had been the year before—

Oregon sunshine, lomatia, Indian paintbrush, wild irises, and thirty-one other kinds—and I remembered how much my out-of-town guests had loved the beauty of my mountains, the views and the flowers. A breeze calmed my mind. Birds were a balm. Above all there was the walking itself, in the woods, on the open hillsides, through the flowers. The day was succor.

          Mourning is not an activity that precludes all others. Walking, writing, planting flowers, visiting friends, and recalling memories through tales and photographs are a part of mourning, which is like the waves of the ocean: now crashing, now receding, now flowing gently, now loud, now just a murmur. Mourning is just a way of loving the one who is gone.