Weird, Surreal, Odd

At the end of a post today at Charlotte was Both, Amy described something that I too have felt in the days after someone close to me has passed away:

There is one aspect of this that I could never have anticipated. You can anticipate grief a bit. Sadness. Loss. Even shock.

But what I could not have anticipated and find a particular mystery is the strangeness of it. Christopher kept saying, “I just don’t get it. It’s weird.”

It is confusing and strange. And here, I am not talking about the question of “Why did this happen?” or “What could I have done?” although those questions certainly recur.

It is surreal and odd. Here one minute, gone the next, without a chance to say goodbye. Sunday’s experience did not really help in that regard for as fearful as I was, anticipating, when the moment came, without getting too specific, the line from the gospel flashed through my soul, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” I could not connect that experience with the smiling face in the pictures surrounding us and the voice still echoing in my ears and memory. And the fear was gone. But the dissonance remained. And does.

To use the old phrase: It does not compute.

There is a mystery, as I was telling Dorothy, and what I feel driven to do is not “understand” it, really. It is not even to “accept” it. It is something different, and I don’t get what that is - where that space is and what it looks like.