Grieving

When I am grieving, I find that I turn to books, stories, poems, anything with words to lose myself in. Tomorrow I am attending a funeral for a baby in the morning and a wake for the father of a coworker in the evening. While I'm at work, I find I cannot concentrate. There is a sadness to everything that is somehow made even sadder by the fact that it will pass. During a break in the day, I picked up this week's copy of The New Yorker and tried to find something to take my mind off the events of yesterday. Instead, I found a poem by Matthew Dickman called "Grief." One of the amazing powers of the written word is its ability to make the day you are dwelling in okay. As if the words are actually saying: "It's okay to feel this way or be this way." And while I do not feel better necessarily, I feel a little bit more accepting.