Florence called me today to tell me it's about time I updated my blog. Yes, it is about time. To say I've been busy is just one excuse that usually suffices, but I have also been sad. I realized these past few weeks that words sometimes can be utterly useless. My dear, dear friend Olivia lost her father unexpectedly, and, as I watched her suffer, watched my usually exuberant friend go silent and see the tears, seemingly without end, fall from her eyes, I suffered with her and for her - because the world had lost a great man and because I could do nothing to take her suffering away. I sat in vigil with her at the hospital, I prayed, but words were not her or my comfort that day.
As I was going through old issues of The Sun Magazine I came across this poem by Stuart Kestenbaum and I thought immediately of Olivia and her sister Maria, two wonderful women who are the product of their God-fearing, honorable parents.
It doesn't announce itself or knock
on the door of your heart. Suddenly
it's right behind you,
looking with great pity
at the back of your neck
and your shoulders on which
it spends days placing a burden
and lifting it. Grief arrives
in its own sweet time, sweet
because it lets you know that
you are alive, time because
what you are holding becomes
the only day there is: the sun stops
moving, the sky grows utterly quiet
and impossibly blue. Behind the blue
are the stars we can't see and beyond
the stars either dark or light,
both of which are endless.
To Olivia and Maria-
I promise one day the grief with subside. It will not entirely dissipate. You will always miss your father, but, at one point, the grief will not seem endless. I love you both very much.
Your Katya
