Longing
Last Sunday, the first of October, dawned sunny and cool. While sitting on the front porch swing, I noticed that the trees along our block were beginning to flash yellow, orange and red. Later at church, tears welled in my eyes during the opening prayer. Something in my center dropped, registering it in my bones, heart, and mind the changing of the seasons.
Now, the leaves signal, it is time to grieve.
My Dad died in our family home on a brisk day in November of 2017. Though he was sick with brain cancer for two years before he died, it was that fall that marked his intense physical and mental decline and by mid-November we were saying our goodbyes. Every autumn echoes that autumn; a slow, quiet march towards death.
Grief has held me tight for a long while, but I sense it morphing. I’m calling it by a new name: longing. And that longing feels like a necessity for living. Longing is the force that animates my relationship with my Dad, making it feel alive even though he has passed on.
There is a coffee shop down the street that I like to walk to with my son to get coffee and eat a cinnamon roll. In early September we sat out in the sunshine next to a mother and her daughter, who seemed to be four or five. She asked her mom “what’s dying?”, and before her mom could respond added, “like going somewhere else?” “Yes”, her mom responded, “it’s like going somewhere else.” “Like Ireland?” “Well, no.”
In the first couple of years after my Dad’s death, my sister-in-law said that her kids would confuse God and Pepé (our nickname for my Dad). I get it. They are both this ever present, unseen beings, full of miraculous love, incomprehensible, out in the infinite.
Longing also feels like a desire for reunion. My greatest desire is to be reunited with my Dad. Because of that intense longing, melancholy feels like my default emotional state. I often wallow, and oddly, find meaning in a sense of sadness.
In his book A Heart that Works, actor Rob Delaney writes about his need to listen to sad music during and after his young son’s sickness and death from a brain tumor. He describes that desire for a tangible sadness, in this case, mournful sounding music, as an attempt to find a physical equalizer between his interior and exterior self.
The journalist Susan Cain wrote a book about this state of sorrow and longing, which she calls “Bittersweet” that began with the question “why do we like sad songs?” She found it a desire supported by neuroscience and psychology, which posits “yearning melodies help our bodies to achieve homeostasis—a state in which our emotions and physiologies function within optimal range.”
Weaver Anni Albers grounds the search through longing for internal homeostasis in material, saying “To make it visible and tangible, we need light and material, any material. And any material can take on the burden of what had been brewing in our consciousness or subconsciousness, in our awareness or in our dreams.”
In an interview, author Isabel Allende talks about losing her daughter, then a few months later welcoming a granddaughter into her family, and thinking that the two, at least for a short while, must have been in the same place. I’ve been thinking about that with my son Charlie, my Dad’s namesake. That he came from the same quiet, dark, bright beyond where my Dad is. Between November 18th, 2017 and March 10th, 2023 they were in the same place. I can see that place in Charlie’s eyes. I wonder how long I will see it. I wonder if he remembers it.
Sources:
Albers, Anni, “Material as Metaphor”, statement on panel “The Art/Craft Connection: Grass Roots or Glass Houses” at the College Art Association’s 1982 annual meeting.
Cain, Susan. Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. United Kingdom: Penguin Books, Limited, 2022, 35.
Delaney, Rob. A Heart That Works: The Sunday Times Bestseller. United Kingdom: Hodder & Stoughton, (n.d.).
Dreyfus, Julia Louis. Interview with Isabelle Allende. Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis Dreyfus. Podcast audio. https://lemonadamedia.com/podcast/julia-gets-wise-with-isabel-allende/