Grief does not pass; it changes shape. At first it arrives like a tsunami of tears, and later as something quieter—an ache that dulls, a tear that comes less often, but never quite leaves the edge of memory.
This came home to me at a concert Val and I attended. One of the support acts played a song called “Crow” to a crowd of over ten thousand people. Written for the singer’s father figure, the crow becomes a stand-in for memory itself—persistent, sometimes haunting, a mixture of love, loss, and the difficulty of moving on.
Around the same time, I listened to an Irish actor reading “The Dead” by James Joyce. What struck me was not the story itself, but the ending: the quiet realization that the dead continue to live within us, and that one day we too will survive only as memory. In Joyce’s hands, this is not despair, but a profound affirmation of life.
So this story is “after” James Joyce and Andrew Davie and probably not as good as either and dedicated to all those that grieve
