The weight of grief
Writing on a regular basis, publishing once a week, and eventually creating a community of women readers who would share their heartfelt experiences of motherhood... I did what I could as an aspiring but serious author, driven by very simple, clear and promising principles. Then, the woman who raised my sisters and I passed away. Gone in a flash, as they say. My everyday life of thirty years, a tiny parcel of her entire memory, now lies buried, resigned to an unconvincing farewell.
Slow mo. I didn't cry as much as my sisters, but I felt a “slow down” button activate in my brain. I apologize to my clients for the time it takes me to satisfy their requests. I struggle to stay on the phone with friends for too long. I work in the office as late as possible because I don't have the energy to play with the kids. I cannot write. Everything is heavy, useless, languid. I feel my whole being trapped in an unbreakable stone, forever cast to Point Nemo.
My faith is compromised. I have trouble getting up for morning prayer. I no longer revise my Arabic lessons, which used to help me read the Quran regularly and smoothly. And for the past few days, I've been asking God to reassure me through a dream that my aunt is well, to help me turn the page, as I'd managed to do with Abou Touré when he passed. Every night, I ask myself a thousand questions, and every night, I replay the neglected days when I could not have guessed that this was the last jollof rice, the last laugh, the last embrace, the last shared breath.
“Life doesn't always follow the contours of our desires, Beautiful.” An infernal but sobering truth that my Uncle Abou often repeated to me, and which I turned into a principle of life when he died. Such principles are useful for the hypersensitive, they help you accept unpleasant surprises. As for the other less painful principles – discipline, rigor, a healthy diet, regular sport, honesty, selfless benevolence – these principles elevate you into a forger of a finer humanity. And because I exhort myself to practice them daily, I often take them for granted, thinking that I've acquired total control of my emotions. I choose to serve my principles, not my whims and desires. But this time, love and the resulting grief took precedence over everything else. We can agree that principles must sometimes take precedence over emotions, but it is crucial to accept that there is something stronger than them, that there is the person who practices them, the human being, in all his complexity and vulnerability, and who breaks down, reduced to nothing in the absence of the loved one.
Slow mo.
Last night, I was looking at a photo of my aunt dressed in a big red boubou before I went to sleep. I saw her in a dream, dressed in the same outfit, entering my office:
“My God!” I cried, running to hug her. “I have cried so much for you, I have cried so much. Is this you? Tell me you're all right. Please reassure me.”
“Alhamdulilah,” she said. “Thank God”, her head bowed and her eyes sad, as if to express her sorrow for leaving us so unexpectedly. Then she held me tightly in her arms and we stayed like that for a long while.
I wake up. August, gray and deceitful, is coming to an end... I'll resume my writing journey in September. My principles will still prevail, but now they'll be clothed in tenderness and an acceptance of giving free rein to Love.
