It’s very hard still to describe accurately what intense grief causes.
Now that we’re talking about it, I remember some visualizing I did about coming back to life and it was this…
I saw that I was kind of on plateaus I had climbed to, pulled myself up to from a very foggy bottom. There was almost always a rope bridge to cross, there was nothing about the trail leading to the new level place that did not involve fear and danger. But then I’d be there. And realize I had got there. And look back and see the place I had been, below, and that I was no longer in it.
It was an enormously pleasant, rewarding thing to see. Most of the time for especially the first two years I didn’t think I was leaving the insanity at all or getting better, yet was on some level very determined to be fully functional again. It’s very hard still to describe accurately what intense grief causes. It’s different than depression. It’s different than sadness. It’s different than a deep neurosis or psychosis. It’s grief and has it’s own defining and I still can’t describe it well. It’s very out of body, very like being on another planet, a loss of normal references, information, history.
I wasn’t sure I’d write Edith’s Story at all. But you know, John, it was a new place
for me that put me where other human beings have gone before or are going through now, and for that reason I thought well damn, record it.
When I decided to write that story it was in part to remember my child and in part to forgive myself for some of my very bad parenting.
Edith’s Story is published in The Gandy Dancer & Other Short Stories.
Part 4 of 4
[NOTE: A Google search yields no mention of Trevor Paul Sparhawk, nor can I find any record of his traffic fatality in NYC archives – although I may need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone reading this knew or knows of or has any information about Trevor, his life and/or death, PLEASE email me at oops.john@gmail.com]
The Hawks Perch 