She didn’t know it would be this way. She had left a marriage of over 25 years duration, something that needed to happen, which had produced two beautiful children; and it never occurred to her that grief, a fuselage of sorrow, would be ignited. For the first year or so, it was subterranean. The rumblings were indistinct and much more in the distance. As she rounded the corner into her second year post-marriage, the yawning abyss of sadness beneath her opened up more.
She was not going to accept this invitation of downward descent. This was not her way. But, you see, other areas in her life had recently changed as well. Her younger son had taken off for college, following in his older brother’s footsteps three years previously. Her mother had died. She had been in decline for several years so this was not a surprise. But, nonetheless...
The gravitational pull of grief had given her a run for the money. She didn’t want to deny its place. She wanted its efficacy, its power, to create a deeper wisdom. She wanted it to pay obeisance to those marital years and all they represented; to do its work. This was appropriate. Yet, she wanted to grow; to be like the sunflower ever seeking sunlight, and not be diminished in this run of the melancholy.
She heard it, this trill and resonance of the deeply melancholy, in the bird’s song every morning outside her window. And, yet, she persevered in mining her life in the best possible way.
And then one morning, the bird simply sang.
Annie Kiyonaga
November,
2019