For the last three weeks, much of the attention in our household has been focused on bodily matters, as Willa continues to mend physically and has been slowly recovering her eyesight. Her vision is almost back to normal, but is still blurry in her left eye. The ophthalmologist wants to see her again this week.

While we expected to be caring for three bodily beings, we’ve been kept busy caring for the two with which we’ve been left. For the first while, Willa’s infirmity provided me with a welcome object for my affection. Help up and down the stairs, to the bathroom, and in the shower, cleaning the incision and between her toes. Ice packs and chest bindings for milk coming in. (As Willa put it: “My body’s protests against Jules’ absence.” It is both an unwanted reminder and something whose eventual cessation will also be felt as loss.) When she was struck by blindness there were pills and eye drops and ointments to be administered every few hours. As one friend noted, it is no wonder that a pain this deep should be followed by blindness. 

Now, with Willa’s body quite steadily healing from physical wounds, we are forced to tend to wounds unseen. As my wise uncle noted to me, the former is much easier to treat than the latter. No sure path is known, but can only be trod. 

In our birthing class, our instructors noted that birthing happens in horticultural time, rather than industrial time. Acute grief, it seems to me, happens in a kind of ecstatic time. It unfolds itself untethered from clocks or crops, unspooling fast and slow at the cadence of feeling alone.

Grief is also a profoundly bodily experience, and thank God for that because otherwise I would almost certainly think I was going mad. Though even in the body, it is ever changing and full of contradictions. It sends shocks of energy and feeling through me, then leaves me so lethargic, so spent, I can barely summon the will to move. At times I can’t even manage to eat, then suddenly I find myself starving. I feel a compulsion to keep myself occupied, while simultaneously feeling indecisive and unsure about what can be done — since, of course, there is nothing that can be done. 

It’s also difficult to take a good shit when you’re this sad. One wouldn’t necessarily expect it but others have reported experiencing the phenomena so I know I’m not alone. In any case, I am denied that small daily pleasure, too.

During the days, I often try to get a break, to find distraction, but like a river that has been dammed, the power of the reservoir of emotion overwhelms me by the nighttime, and I have found myself lowered to the bed or floor, tears breaching whatever barriers I’ve managed to cobble together in the daytime.

There have been a series of moments, predictable moments, that have been like grim milestones, not-yet-fully-catharted cairns on whatever path I’m traveling. 

Being scooped up from the floor and ushered into the OR, whisked past Willa on the operating table, to my baby, also on a miniature operating table. Thoughts: My baby is real. My baby is a boy. My baby is dead. (Undeniably so, blue and purple on the table.)

Telling my wife Willa that Jules is dead, that I’m so glad she’s alive — repeatedly for what I believe was two hours as she wakes up from an amnesia-inducing sedation, mouthing the words, “My Baby, Where is *my* baby?” mutely around the respirator in her mouth.

Saying goodbye to Jules, after holding him close to us for four days: beholding his beauty, singing to him, praying over him. Stealing myself, forcing myself to leave him behind in the hospital room, so they can take him to the morgue.

Kissing his head three times in a final goodbye at the crematorium. The weight of gravity and death has caused his face to scrunch, finally obscuring our sense of his expressiveness, his latent personality.

The latest of these moments came last week. With Willa’s eyesight returned, we opened the bag, unwrapped the box, and undid the seal. His being, so fearfully and wonderfully made over 40 weeks and 5 days, now returned to ashes from which he came, bits of bone one of the final unique configurations of his person — though I have been clinging to the scent on his little jumper, a magical sensory transporter into his bodily presence, but even it has almost left us. All we have to hold fast to now is our grief, to keep our Jules as close to our hearts as we are able.

The last decade of my life has been devoted to fighting man-made evil, but there are no systems at work here that can readily be blamed, no agents who can be yelled at or punished. This is the purest kind of natural evil, and politics has no hold on it. 

So, I have pulled out the heavy machinery. Camus, Nietzsche, Heidigger. Simone Weil, Thomas Merton. I haven’t had the energy to read too many of them yet, a few essays and pages. But I think the time will come. (The search for understanding is one of my oldest and dearest defense mechanisms, but I’m trying to summon the courage to let myself just be and feel, too.)

Poetry has been, if not a healing force, then at least another aid in grief. Mary Oliver has remained ever at our side and I’ve brought in Emily Dickinson for reinforcements, slowly making my way chronologically through a collection of her poems. Others are standing by to be dispatched if needed.

Of course, I think the reality is that a pain like this — simultaneously revealing the fragile miracle of life and the profound absurdity of minded matter — is recalcitrant to any final narration. It can only be felt, experienced. The one thing that is most difficult to bear. 

People say our culture doesn’t do well with grief. That is of course a vague diagnosis. Besides a small cottage industry of self-help and cultural production, grief can only be an inconvenience to the profit system, a drag on productivity. It doesn’t even really help with social reproduction, the maintenance of life that is needed to keep the rest of the world running apace. Perhaps it’s only real utility, omnipresent today, is to be disavowed, detached from its original object, and transferred as blind anger or rage.

Still, the grief is there and I have been thinking about others I know who have been grieving. People who have lost spouses, fathers, long-time friends, human-beings-in-becoming. And not least of all those who have lost futures of various kinds, longings unrequited but desperately desired. I have looked away, carried on as one does, not as attentive to you as I should be.

There is an isolation in grief. No one can do it for you and the context is always unique. At the same time, the pain found here is universal. So perhaps it is a portal, from within each one of us, to the other. Maybe, if we let it be. 

Photo: A white rose on the Burren, just outside of Fanore on the West coast of Ireland. I took the photo when we were there in 2018. It was pouring rain and you can see the droplets clinging everywhere. The rose reminds me of Mary Oliver’s poem Heavy.