Maybe the Poets Were Right

This is my first death of a loved one with whom I remained close. I'm 42 years old. More than that, it's the death of the person I loved most, and for all my life. This is hard, the pain, the tears, trying to measure the void a person – my person – leaves behind. But, blurring focus, it's also illuminating. We don't really understand loss until we're in it. I'm not sure I understand it now, but I can more clearly see its contours, and its violence.

Some aspect of what I wrote about the photo seemed familiar. That night – the first night – as I was finally falling asleep, it came to me:

How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!
–Edna St Vincent Millay

That's been batting around my head since. And this, from the Agamemnon, which Bobby often recited after tragedies and helped him cope with loss:

God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
–Æschylus

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