Gratitude

I want to specially thank all of you who took the time to leave a comment regarding my Rav's suicide. Thank you for your understanding and wisdom and compassion, though I find my expressions weak and deficient in letting you know how much you have touched me. Your words mean more to me than you can imagine, in a world filled with shame about such things. Sometimes, it seems, it is strangers rattling about the four corners of this planet who bring comfort across seas and mountains, when others closer to you, do not, or cannot.

I scan J-blogs and it feels like a wildly colourful passing parade, flags fluttering and raised high, J-blogs crunchy and bitter and sweet in their offerings. It is a parade that I feel sliding by me, because time crumples into nothingness when there is suicide, and the world takes on the texture of a playground for innocents.

Somehow, blogging about this-and-that feels like such a gift, a privilege, a pitch for life, not death. I am so envious of those whose lives go on merrily, or crankily, thoughtfully, or superficially. I long to be in that stream, but suicide leaves you half-stunned, and part dead, raging with love, and it seems impossible to write anything unless you want to start a suicide blog. And you don't know when this exceptional, unwelcome, bitter and obsessive grief will die down, when the questions will be at least partially satisfied. There is a rent in the fabric of the universe, and that's all I know, right now.

So, I am deeply grateful, close to undone by those who came forward to succor the hidden, uncelebrated, ordinary person that is me. It is so tragically true that with suicide, unless you've been there you can't even begin to grasp the cacophony of grief. May you and everyone be blessed to never know its shattering grip. May you only know love, and may it keep you whole till love and time cease to exist.