Today this poem – When Great Trees Fall, by Maya Angelou is swirling round in my head. I love the words- I read it at Dad’s interment and it was true then and true now.

A week has passed since mum died, which feels impossible. Time has stopped or shrunk, days pass by in a blur, in a numb, dissociated blur.

It feels like I’m lost in the dark, cold cave that Maya describes. There are flashes of raw, visceral, howling sorrow, when I think my body will tear apart, but these if anything, are the easier times. It feels right, it feels honest.

What I find harder are the blank times, the times I feel nothing, nothing at all. My head knows that it is just another aspect of grief. Knows that my soul needs time to assimilate the last month, with all the fear and loss and thresholds crossed. I know my body is emotionally and physically exhausted, and this numbness is resting time, is all part of the longer grief process.

My head knows that, but my heart screams to feeling something, anything. To feel the enormity of this experience. I go back over those last moments, over and over…and feel nothing. I stare at mum’s empty bed and feel nothing. I yearn for reality to return. My heart recognises the weight, the knee buckling weight of all I’m carrying, but it won’t yet release it.

I know I just have to let it be, to let the process unfold in it’s own time, that my sense of guilt for not feeling is unjustified. I’m not going mad. I have not become some unfeeling monster. I am in deep grief and grief follows many twists and turns, that each flow is different, each braid in the river will, eventually reach the same sea.

When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.