Where We Belong

A swift darkness covers your heart
Clouds coalesce and cascade around you
Lifting you out of what was a part
Of a normal day, normal work; true
It is hard to know that feeling is come
As if you could prepare your heart to know
When that sweeping landscape occupies some
Of every fibre, then the memory does grow.
Filling your mind of that mournful day
That depth of sadness never known before.
It pricks with a sting unnatural to God's way,
An eternal life we wholeheartedly pray for.
Holding his hand in final time, it was not to be
Forever final, for in God's grace we go not alone.
I just transferred my hand to God's, you see,
My grip falls away; God holds where we belong.
There can be peace in sadness, for eternity
Is still elusive, as if waking from a dream.

When you lose someone so dear, in my case my dad, you remember that day, year after year. You do not try to, it is just there along with the darkness of that day. As I look back now eights years, I find hope. I see hope. I embrace hope. Hope adds colour to the landscape, reminiscent of those years of visiting the North Carolina mountains as a family each autumn. 

Through words of poetry, given in reflection and quiet, they formulate thoughts better than I feel I could. They speak as if I was just grabbing them from the air around me when I feel inadequate. Pen poised in the air for but a moment, and then words spill out in minutes. 

As is my way, I had turned to books as I tried to grasp the difficulty of death. The author who helped me the most here is George MacDonald (1824-1905). A consistent theme in most of his writings/stories is this recurring notion of sleeping (dying) to wake up. A dreamlike wakefulness that sets one free. Of letting go and losing oneself in order to find one's true self, and reach the space of eternal life. This is particularly potent in my favourite novel of his, Lilith.

Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the broad daylight, but I never dream now. It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more! But when I wake at last into that life which as a mother her child, carries life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more. I wait; asleep or awake, I wait.
- George MacDonald, Lilith