As experience tells us, not everyone mourns the same way or for the same duration. Mourning is a private matter, and it can persist for years in the background of daily life. With help from loved ones and professionals we can lessen its effect, but it rises persistently as the sun.
Unlike Earth’s actual sun, however, the morning of mourning occurs in unexpected times and from unexpected directions. Its unpredictability can extend mourning throughout a lifetime. Even turning away from this rising darkness doesn’t free us from its effects; rather, it makes us see our own shadows along a chosen path. No, the better choice between facing the unexpected rise and turning away is to wear the protective glasses of reality.
We mourn because we were meant to mourn. Gerard Manly Hopkins probably caught the reality most succinctly in his poem “Spring and Fall” about the emotions of a girl named Margaret. Hopkins asks, “Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?” Only the poem does full justice to the thought, but here’s the nutshell version: Any death, even that of leaves in the fall, can represent all death. Any loss can represent all loss, even our own deaths.
Mourning rises in all of us at sometime. There might be some comfort in that knowledge. If now you mourn, know that there are others who now witness the same rise. We are bound to one another by the commonness of the experience that breaks upon our days and unexpectedly eclipses our forgetful happiness.
You can’t do anything to stop the leaves from falling, but you can recognize a truth: After the bleak darkness of winter, new leaves will grow under a rising spring sun.
Unlike Earth’s actual sun, however, the morning of mourning occurs in unexpected times and from unexpected directions. Its unpredictability can extend mourning throughout a lifetime. Even turning away from this rising darkness doesn’t free us from its effects; rather, it makes us see our own shadows along a chosen path. No, the better choice between facing the unexpected rise and turning away is to wear the protective glasses of reality.
We mourn because we were meant to mourn. Gerard Manly Hopkins probably caught the reality most succinctly in his poem “Spring and Fall” about the emotions of a girl named Margaret. Hopkins asks, “Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?” Only the poem does full justice to the thought, but here’s the nutshell version: Any death, even that of leaves in the fall, can represent all death. Any loss can represent all loss, even our own deaths.
Mourning rises in all of us at sometime. There might be some comfort in that knowledge. If now you mourn, know that there are others who now witness the same rise. We are bound to one another by the commonness of the experience that breaks upon our days and unexpectedly eclipses our forgetful happiness.
You can’t do anything to stop the leaves from falling, but you can recognize a truth: After the bleak darkness of winter, new leaves will grow under a rising spring sun.
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