our separatedness and our grief

 

 

What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap,

that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here

over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever.

Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions

you think of that you ought to've asked while you had a chance are never

going to be answered. The dead know, and you don't.

 

And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before.

You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you,

and in a way you go with them. They don't live on in your heart, but your

 heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets

bigger on the outside. If the dead had been alive only in this world, you

would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, 

because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived 

in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. You

can't see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It's with your side vision, 

so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted

I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know.

It's our separatedness and our grief that break the world in two.

~ Wendell Berry

from Stand by Me

art by Luke Marston

Coast Salish Artist