Entry Forty-Three:
Grief is like eating…if you consume too much too quickly, the food is harder to digest. I must learn to deal with my heartache one small piece at a time…I must chew it well, and then swallow.
But why am I grieving? Benjamin is still alive. But that makes my grief all the more difficult to bear. There is no body for me to bury. There is no closure…no conclusion. It is as if the burial cave is standing wide open, its mouth agape in an awful yawning grimace. If I do not force the past into the present, I have nothing to hold onto.
But that is why I must discipline myself to deal with only one portion of my grief at a time. If I try to gulp down the wall of pain that confronts me…a barrage of memories…of what ifs and should haves…then I will choke. I find that if I keep an image of Benjamin in the forefront of my mind at all times, I am able to slice through the tough meat of my internal agony and separate one bleeding, pulsating piece from the rest. Perhaps that is why the Scriptures say that the life is in the blood…it is the bleeding of my heart that causes the most distress…my grief drains me of life like a slow bleed.
I paint a mental portrait of Benjamin…laughing, loving, living. He stands before me every moment of every day. Like God kept the walls of Jerusalem before Him even while our forefathers were still in captivity and while the city still lay in ruins so I keep Benjamin before me. He may be in exile…his reputation may lie all about me in ruins…but his image I will keep before me continually.
Then, when reality rises up to accuse me of living a fantasy…living a life built on a foundation of groundless hope with bricks made of dreams and an anticipative imagination…then I remember that God also kept faith…and that faith was no fantasy.
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