May 12
Zhuangzi sat by his wife's grave, beating a drum and singing. Birth and death, he said, alternate like spring and autumn.
The True Book of the Southern Land of Blossoms (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Zhuangzi sat by his wife's grave, beating a drum and singing. Birth and death, he said, alternate like spring and autumn.
After a loss, the first lightness often arrives unannounced. You laugh at a remark before you have considered whether you feel like laughing. Or you notice one afternoon that for hours you haven't thought of the person who is missing.
This can feel like a betrayal. The grief was heavy, but it held a connection. As long as it coloured everything, the other person was still present in every day. When it eases, they too seem to move a little further away, and it is your own everyday life that lets them go.
Yet it is not settled that the closeness depended on the pain. Perhaps it is only changing its form. A song you both knew may one day give you pleasure again, without that pleasure shutting them out. Some laughter is even meant for them: for a turn of phrase they would have used, a joke only they would have understood.
You can't know that for certain. And on some days the heaviness is simply back, without asking whether you were expecting it just then.
