A new topography
I am learning that the landscape of grief is a strangely unnerving place. In part its strangeness is that those things which you had thought would be familiar…are not familiar at all. Grief can turn a soft memory into an unforgiving rock face or a hairbrush into a sword to pierce the heart. Regrets, like injected foam, expand to fill the space you give them. Words spoken or heard are like an old cassette left next to a magnet – muffled by exposure to greater force.
Mourning shadow
Like the picture above, taken on an early morning visit to the cemetery, there is beauty here but it is strange and unnerving. In the end, the only thing which can pass the border controls into this strange new land is the faith which was there before its gates opened. The One who was there on the other side, is here on this side too, as it turns out. God, who created the love which hurts so much, will also give the balm to soothe the rawness of grief. Not today, nor tomorrow, perhaps – but in time.
Early on Monday morning last week, before things began to crumble so dramatically and irreversibly, I took a walk in the frost. The most ordinary things, like the discarded bud below, were turned into delicate works of art by the icy fingers of winter.
I shall continue to look for beauty in this new winter landscape – and I believe I shall find it.
