Other times in December

Sometimes, grief feels numb. Like when you wipe the roof of your mouth with your tongue. Other times, grief burns. And, it’s raw. It bites. Like the feeling you have when there is a blister in your nasal cavities.

I might be wrong. May be there are no moments when grief feels numb. Perhaps it is all a performance – that numbness – just to aid us live and survive through daily toils.

It might be that each time grief is fire, carried in a knapsack. That when we lose, and grieve, we are forced to carry fire. As is every other fire, sometimes it warms us. Other times, it burns us. Unlike most fires, it does not consume us. Or, perhaps, it consumes us little by little. Maybe it nibbles at us in quiet gradual ways. Our souls disintegrate, it might be, at the pace of natural soil formation. Or, more aptly, at the rate of continental drift.

In 2014, in December, I had texted with a friend late in the night. She was hospitalised.

It had been a brief illness. Almost as if it was no illness.

Four days before: she had jetted into Malawi.

Two days after: she complained of a headache.

An additional two days: she was hospitalised. The over the counter medication she had taken had not been helpful.

“It’s meningitis,” she wrote. “I am almost in paralysis – a half of me. I am in pain.”

I wanted to call. She could not talk. She said I should call the following day. She was hopeful. I was certain I would call the other day.

The other day? No prize for guessing. A message from her sister:

“Dave, Esther died in the night.”

There is no word, or words, that ably capture the confusion that comes after hearing about death. The emotions one goes through after that are not just chaos. I went back to the texts from the previous night. She had feared she might die. I had told her to push out that thought, I was about to call her the next day.

But, she was right. I was wrong.

Now, her memories are this: grief. A fire. In the knapsack. Carried on the laps. Hidden yet still in sight.