Long Tail of Grief
Written June 18, 2012 at Emerald Isle NC
Yesterday evening I tried to convince my teenager to leave the fishing pier whre he had been baking in the sun and fishing and basically being a guy for nearly ten hours, I pointed to the black clouds rolling in from across the bay. “Look, it’s about to storm, you need to come back to the beach house.” He replied: “That’s not a storm, Mom, a house is on fire over there.”
The massive bank of clouds did seem to be emanating from one point, but they spread across the entire sky and far out over the sea. “There’s no way that’s from a house fire,” I said. Matt demurred “okay, it doesn’t matter, just come get me if it starts raining.” After a brief discussion about time and dinner and the million other negotiating points that make up life with a teen, I left.
In the parking lot were three pick up trucks completely caked with what looked like mud, like molting birds slewing off feathers. First I thought they’d been out doing some sort of all terrain vehicle stuff. As I got closer, I realized they were covered with big chunks of ash. Under the ash I could dimly see the words “fire department.”
The thought of someone’s home — or several people’s homes — going up in smoke and all their possessions being melted down, transformed to chunks of ash that then became part of a change in the entire weather system caught my attention. The giant cloud above the beach town stretched as far out to sea as the eye could see. It was easily as wide as the entire barrier island. It was as though the lint from a dryer filter was reaching out in all directions. It was a blanket covering us, a blanket made up of some family’s or families’ dreams, hopes, reality. And now there was this massive cloud heading out to sea to rain down into the ocean.
The long tail of grief, it seemed. A bad metaphor, but impossible to get out of my mind. The very long tail of grief. A life transformed must go somewhere, it has a physical presence — whether transformed by fire or just by emotion. And that blanket of bits and pieces of those dreams must live in reality untiil the weather changes and they can fall out of the sky, become something else entirely. We have no control over the climatology; the chunks and bits of the past will hover in the atmosphere as long as they need to before they enter some other state of being, some other state of decay into the physical world or into our sub-conscious.
We can’t make it happen any faster than it needs to happen. It is a physical as well as a metaphysical phenomenon. And so these last two and half years began to make some sense. The sleeping, the hurting, the aching, and then the waking up. And knowing, once the ash and the dust and the detritus of the transformation clears, we will remain. Perhaps not triumphant, but still living. Perhaps wiser. And still capable of love and joy.
The 11 o’clock news informed us that it wasn’t a house fire, but a controlled burn in the Croatan National Forest. Croatan. The word carved into a tree at the last known site of the lost colony. The first NC settlers followed the Croatan indians into the woods and were never seen again. But local legend has it that when NC was ultimately settled, blue-eyed natives lived on the coast. One of those blue-eyed Indians was my great-great-great grandmother. Transformed. A new life.
