Winter Never Ends

So when does grief end? Does it ever end? I'm beginning to think that it doesn't end, it just evolves, transmutes ever so gently and slowly with time. I suspect that each new day, each new discovery, each moment of life transforms grief. Grief is a living breathing entity. I should probably name it since it seems it will be with me for the rest of my life.

No one can apparently escape grief. Everyone looses someone or something if they live long enough. The some things are little or big. The someones are life long companions or peripheral parts of your life. The loss brings a moment or a lifetime of grief.

My mother died twenty years ago this month. My father died seventeen years ago this month. I'd love to know which one of them gave me which of these genes of mine. I can look in the mirror and at photographs and figure out where the eyes and the nose and the other physical things came from. But the genes that determine the inner workings are a mystery. I could well have gotten the Celiac genes from both of them. That would suck. They're both candidates. Of course I'm the only one in the family diagnosed as a Celiac, but that is neither surprising nor unusual. Most people don't want to know, even given the information. My sister is in denial, I can hear it when I talk to her about it. She doesn't want to know. I can feel her backpedaling on the phone when we talk. I can't make her listen or make her do the research, or make her take a blood test. I can't make anyone change. Just another train headed down the tracks. And it leaves me that much more alone. Is it any wonder I sometimes feel like the adopted step child? They couldn't possibly have inherited the same genes for kidney or Celiac Disease that I did. Nope. I must have gotten it from someone else, that's the only explanation. If I didn't inherit them from my mother or my father what does that leave, ehhhhh?

It was ten years after my mother's death before I could look at a photograph of her. To say our relationship was difficult would be an understatement. Grief, what there was of it, was mostly on hold while I got past the anger. By then, ten years later grief was tempered with forgiveness and understanding. It was grief that she wasn't there for each milestone or achievement. It was grief that she could not have been the mother her children needed her to be, and forgiveness because she never had a role model to work from, and now forgiveness because she may well have had to live with the same gluten designed depression and rage that I have. My grief at her loss has evolved from day one to now in fits and spurts, through bouts of anger and moments of recognition.

The grief at my father's passing has changed the least. What little forgiving there was to do was more about what he didn't do than what he did. And perhaps it's been tempered by the knowledge that he is the voice in my head. It is his logic, his response, his view point that guides the choices I make. It is his voice that the conversations in my head speak with. He has never left me in so many ways. At the same time his loss was the hardest to take. Our relationship was the one that had the least amount of time to grow.

So what to name my grief? Winter I think. In mythology Pluto abducted Proserpine, and Proserpine's mother Ceres brought about winter with her grief at the loss. It somehow seems fitting. More appropriate than George or Cindy. Ceres was the goddess of growing plants and of motherly love. Appropriate, yes.