keening..grief notes

keen :
from the gaelic..caoinim..i wail..

a young man has died on the road..
rounding a corner on his scooter
he was lifted off.. he is gone..
his father is a shepherd..
there are always 20 men around him..
give or take a few..
....now..
as he sits at the bar..
in the square..
wailing, keening..
men keeping company..
circling him in his grief cry..
his mother..the women.. at home..
stitching their loss in their handwork...


death is a lonely visitor
after it visits your home, nothing is ever the same again.
there is an empty place at the table;
there is an absence in the house.
having someone close to you die
is an incredibly strange and desolate experience.
something breaks within you then
that will never come together again.
gone is the person whom you loved,
whose face and hands and body you knew so well.
this body, for the first time, is completely empty.
this is very frightening and strange.
after the death many questions come into your mind
concerning where the person has gone,
what they see and feel now.
the death of a loved one is bitterly lonely.
when you really love someone,
you would be willing to die in their place.
yet no one can take another’s place
when that time comes.
each one of us has to go alone.
it is so strange that when someone dies,
they literally disappear.
human experience includes all kinds
of continuity and discontinuity,
closeness and distance.
in death, experience reaches the ultimate frontier.
the deceased literally falls out of the visible world
of form and presence.
at birth you appear out of nowhere,
at death you disappear to nowhere. . . .
the terrible moment of loneliness in grief comes
when you realize that you will never see the deceased again.
the absence of their life,
the absence of their voice,
face, and presence
become something that, as sylvia plath says,
begins to grow beside you like a tree.
~john o donohue



pushing through
it’s possible i am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
i am such a long way in i see no way through,
and no space:
everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

i don’t have much knowledge yet in grief

so this massive darkness makes me small.
you be the master: make yourself fierce,
break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,

and my great grief cry will happen to you.
~rainer maria rilke


woodstock by joni mitchell
~ hear her keen at the end....