I woke up yesterday morning with an invisible and heavy apparition straddling me. “This is just grief,” I said to my bedroom ceiling, which was giving me that piteous look. When the obese ghost finally unlocked its legs from my waist so I could get out of bed, it promptly climbed astride my shoulders to ride me all the way to work. While driving, I noticed a bumper sticker on the car ahead of me that read: “Someone I love was murdered!” This heartbreaking sentence positioned like an advertisement to the world struck me as borderline offensive. I was at once sympathetic and disgusted. Who printed such bumper stickers? How many of them sold?
It was alone on the car, this sticker. Its meaning was not crowded out by numerous other aphorisms stuck all over the car’s rear surfaces like pins and patches on a tote bag from the 80’s. Not that a sticker like that could be slapped on among a bunch of lighthearted, political or religious sayings anyway. Its solo existence on the car gave it the grave emphasis it deserved.
Then I walked into work and passed through the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. There, on the TV, was a news broadcast that showed footage of a recent vigil held for Michael Jackson. It showed people standing in the streets, weeping. I watched, dumbfounded. One woman stood alone, gazing at a photo of Michael when he was younger, openly sobbing into her hands while other teary-eyed people milled about. I got my coffee and left the kitchen.
There is a propensity among people to share or announce their sorrow and grief. I understand this inclination—to walk around with a heaviness so burdensome it absolutely has to be shifted off. Somehow. It seems that any overwhelming feeling shares this custom. It’s as though displaying it to the world will lessen it, make it more bearable. But does it instead grow it? Take joy or love, for example. Weddings are held to share these sentiments, sometimes with the public. Doesn’t a display such as that warm the hearts of most? Doesn’t it spread and therefore increase the joy? Is it the same for sorrow and grief?
Then there is the idea that like attracts like. Someone who was recently scorned and heartbroken attending and observing a wedding might not feel the same benevolent emotion. Rather, they might notice a harsh look exchanged or a baby wailing or a piece of trash carelessly tossed away. I wondered then, had I woken up feeling elated and free, would I have noticed the bumper sticker and the weeping woman on TV at all? Would I have seen instead the soft blue sky and the smiles on the faces of coworkers as they greeted me?
We see what we feel. We pay attention to that which reflects our condition. In this way, life is like an opaque green pond in the woods complete with lily pads and frogs, tadpoles flitting under the surface like bits of black light. Its depth and dimension can’t easily be perceived. Things are always rising to the surface. We let them in or not.
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