My Wobbly Bicycle, 166

Gray and cold. Very cold, day after day. Reading a lot. I read Katharine Smyth’s All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf,  based on a short review in The New Yorker. I didn’t realize she would include so much detail about the death of her father. Maybe not what I wanted to read right now. But maybe so. Smyth seamlessly weaves Woolf’s To the Lighthouse through her own story. (“Perhaps there is one book for every life,” she writes). Both books are in their way about grief. Smyth’s father was a difficult man, an alcoholic, but funny, smart, and the center of her life. She takes us step-by-step through his slow decline, his death, and her long grief. Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsey, a beautiful, nurturing woman is the emotional center of the whole Ramsey entourage. After Mrs. Ramsey dies suddenly, the second half of the novel describes the dissolution of the world she’d built around her. Two unmoorings: Woolf’s (the book is strongly autobiographical) and Smyth’s. Smyth says, “My father was dead. How completely strange.” I say, even though we claim we get it, doesn't it still feel strange? We act as if we’re solid and somehow, against all the odds, permanent. When we see, firsthand, that we’re not, well, Smyth says, “Being a human being had suddenly become a more serious occupation than it once seemed.” Smyth:  “To grieve is to be floored, again and again, by a series of epiphanies that, put to paper, sound painfully banal.” Oh heavens, don’t you hate it when people try to tell you all about a book or movie? When all they really mean is that it touched something in them, triggered some emotion they can’t explain but somehow if they keep trying to tell you about it, they’ll get some clarity? Smyth:  “’Dad’s dead.’ Oh I said and cried a bit not because I wanted or needed to, but because it seemed the thing to do.”  I don’t know that I’ve ever read any better account of how grief seems to work. You think you should display it for others, because they expect it, but that might not be the moment it hits you. Or it might not be tears, but a dullness you feel, a flatness. The death of a parent is so primal the grief comes from a source farther down in you than personality. Not his personality. Maybe that, too, but deeper, a quake in the core of what you’re made of. So then I re-read To the Lighthouse. If you haven’t read it in years, or haven’t read it at all, be warned that, like all Virginia’s Woolf’s books, it’s like viewing life underwater. Slow. So deep inside the characters, emotions washing against each other and mixing so that they hardly know what they feel. Books, if they’re good and true ones, give you life to look at, held apart from you enough that you can sometimes see better. They don’t give you answers, because that’s entirely beside the point. They give you lives. All I have to say is, when there’s a major grief, it's likely to puncture a hole in you that lets out all the others, the older ones that have been lying dormant, have not been fully expressed, or need a different language this time. Maybe, too, the massive sorrows of this planet. All I have to say is, to echo Katharine Smyth, life is completely strange. Thank you for the cards. I’ve been glad to get them. *************Also, if you aren’t yet subscribed and would like a notice in your email when I post (approx. once every two weeks), send me an email at fleda@udel.edu. Just say “subscribe.” If you want to unsubscribe, say “unsubscribe.”