About Fathers and Sons
When I was younger, I created this imagery of Life and Death that carried on living with me until this day.
There was once a magical universe, the sky and ground never met, except at one thin point, almost impossible to find. At that specific point, the sky and ground were so close they gave the illusion of touching. What everyone knew, but rarely ever anyone got the chance to witness is that they weren’t actually touching, they were separated by this extremely thin transparent layer of atmosphere.
Life lived on the ground, floated around through the vessels of plants and singing birds, it grew and grew and grew and regenerated over and over again for so long no one knew exactly how it all started and how will it all end. What we knew though, is that it was magnificent, complicated, demanding, and unfair.
Death lived in the sky, travelled through its layers and kept a close watch on the ground, guarding it with utmost loyalty. She never slept, but made sure that the birds who couldn’t sing any longer found a home and the plants that got tired were rescued from their pain. Death cared so much, for every little detail on the ground, so it carried the weight of it all in its heart.
One day, as Life stood by the point where the ground and sky met, she lifted her head up and found Death staring right back at her. For a moment, they watched each others’ eyes where all the mysteries of existence resided, they watched in awe at each others’ resilience and untold stories.
For so long, I believed that Life and Death fell in love, but never could be in the same place at the same moment. Of all the possibilities and uncertainties, the impossibility of them embracing each other was the sole certainty. It was the one and only truth. So they floated apart for millennia, close, but never touching, drifting in and out of each other, present but absent, connected and yet doomed to never meet.
They say that grief eases with time, but I have to disagree. I think that the one thing that makes grief so painful is that it never ends. Grief comes with desperation, with anger, with so much spite it makes you want to claw your eyes out of your face and lay in a bed of gasoline and set it on fire. It makes you want to watch the whole world burn to ashes around you and just stand there and enjoy the smell of oak and ash. Grief is unforgiving. It changes you.
We were bound to lie and say that it gets easier, it makes for good books and quotes, but the reality is, -if you’ve known grief you’ll agree-, it gets harder.
When you start to forget details, the tone of their voice, the way they smiled, how they liked their coffee, when you lose their favourite sweater, or can no longer picture their handwriting in your head, it gets harder. It gets harder and you feel guiltier for simply being alive.
For some of us, life seems to have stopped in motion when we lost who we love, and it angers us to watch the world continue afterwards. I sometimes have this urge to stand and yell at everyone and everything to notice me, to notice my pain, to stop, to stop breathing and eating and caring and feeling and moving and simply being alive, because it’s fucking unfair and I can’t bear it any longer!
But then I’m a rational being, and I am human. So for some moments, I forget. And when I forget, I feel other things than grief, I feel joy, pain, fear, sadness, I feel all the things that we’re bound to feel, and for that moment, I’m not grieving, until I am again.
The thing is that, the world becomes way too big, and you become way too small.
