Grief, What Is Your Name?

After encountering innumerable deaths in the ICU, ushering families through the dying process virtually, grieving a life once lived, simply, amidst so much death, this piece came to life. Today, I write to those entities my mind cannot digest. To the novel tastes that defy even umami, the ones chewed, looking upwards, with eyes closed, to give my tastebuds a bit more bandwidth. Today I write to you, grief. You arrive indiscriminately, luggage brimming with both overwhelming cacophony and also deafening silence. You disrupt conversation, causing coffee to spill over freshly pressed linen. I weep. What was once the fluid and graceful nature of my tongue begins to stutter through poorly concocted words or use inappropriate comedy because life sometimes, is too much to bear. Paradigm shift. Grief is when the life preceding no longer mirrors life thereafter. So I pause, stare towards the muted tones around me and whisper, “Grief, what is your name?” When we are already in mourning and there is more death, what do we call it? From where does more pain emanate when numbness prevails? How do more tears spring from a dried well? Grief, who birthed you? From whose womb were you nourished and sung lullabies? What bosom fed you emotion-scattered, overwhelming, speechless pain? How did your mother come to be? Did she adorn with delicate, yet decadent lace that lingers long after death bringing reminders of what was, via song, scripture or sermon? I ask you, again, grief, what is your name?? Do your eyes puff with sunrise’s trickling red, yellow and orange embers as you awake from a night of tear-stained weeping; a reminder that the escape of dreaming is over. Grief, do you also wish that same sleep would rescue you back to dream, because reality is too harsh, too stinging? Acid to an open wound? When the tone of my mother’s voice becomes less rhythmic, more monotone, less laugh-filled, more littered with pause - I want to almost say the words with her as if to blunt the stab when she breathes deeply and whispers, “I have some bad news.” But grief, I don’t know you. Not like this. You are to come with warning, preparation, a chance to reconcile replaying voicemails when a voice is no longer. A chance to find old pictures when flesh travels to morgue. You are to give us opportunity to go through ritual. We need ritual…or so we thought. Your son – tragedy, robs and steals from us. So we stand, rather, we crumble, shell-shocked. Stranger, what is your name? Until we meet again. But oh! Shall I never you meet again. You make the taste of my own mortality too sweet.