Memory of the Presence

I've been remarkably sentimental the last few days; perhaps it's the sweet reminiscence of the life of my beloved Grandfather whose passing exactly one week ago has left me yearning for a presence which is no longer seen. Like the allegory of old, "At night, I sought the one whom my soul loves / I searched, but did not find him." Grief is, as it were, a manifestation of our conditioning instinct: We grew so accustomed to the presence, we nearly took it for granted. But just as soon as that happened, the presence was gone, and we were left searching for it like Diogenes with his lantern.

Bereavement is like the awkward feeling every one of us has experienced as children as children when we lost a tooth. Initially, the shock and pain, the burning sensation are so overpowering that we are incapacitated. But time heals the wound, and we go on with our lives. Yet every day goes by, and we find ourselves always sensing the void left. The tongue stumbles around in the darkness of the mouth, groping for the place where the tooth had been, but it finds nothing. Somehow we are aware of the fact, rationally, that we have lost a tooth. But to grasp something rationally is completely different from grasping it with our whole being. We how truly small it was, but the place where that tooth had been feels to us as if it were a gaping hole. Suddenly the whole seems to our mind to be even larger than our mouth ever felt before. Here is a profound mystery: the pain of loss always seems greater than the joy of gain. Love lost always seems worse than a life lived without love---ever.

Yet for me, sweet memory fills the void we experience when loss of a loved one occurs, and it comforts us like the feeling of a cotton ball filling up the raw socket. Cotton will never make a tooth, but it can make up for one, at least in some ways. Likewise, memory is an image of thing, like a photograph of a lost friend. We never cling to the picture when the reality is near; but when the reality of the thing is not, it's image and likeness take on aspects of the reality of a thing for us.

Over these last days, little things trigger the memories that flow like warm water over the head. One such occasion was the discovery of a little book of my Grandfather's in the basement bathroom of his house. It was a small, hardbound copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. A stoic to the very end.