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The only one who makes any sense
after your spouse just suddenly drops dead
of a heart attack a week after his fifty-first birthday
is Jeremiah with his fractured structure
and time shattered between past and future.
Friends gave me the usual to read--
C. S. Lewis on Joy, Wolterstorff's lament for his son.
I'd prophetically read Didion's Year of Magical Thinking already
and ironically remembered it while
watching paramedics work in vain to revive him.
But there was no magic there, just the usual hopeless madness.
I received Helen Steiner Rice drivel that meant well,
but I threw it at the wall with much bad language.
A friend gave me a CD of Christian schlock
that she found comforting when her dog died, which I broke.
A former student sent stanzas of an obscure hymn
which approached comfort for its thoughtful appropriateness.
But I needed the full-throated lament of the blues,
the only music I could listen to for that first year.
Mavis Staples' "You're Not Alone" sang me through the night.
I dug out my copy of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy
for a more reflective analysis this side of grief
and Lady Philosophy kept me company without much consolation.
To be fair, there wasn't much to be had anywhere.
Except with Jeremiah who lamented before proffering hope.
Jeremiah had never been a favorite like Isaiah.
He confused the hell outta me, making no sense at all,
until my world roiled like the ground in an earthquake,
which is how I suddenly began to understand the odd book
forged in trauma's broken fragments of incoherent meaning.
So Jeremiah's the only work I recommend for making sense
of grief with its grappling for comprehension
where there is none, its clawing for some scrap of hope
in the midst of despair, its tenacious clinging to faith while screaming
over the ragged wounds left when all is ripped asunder.