Cartography of Grief

Grief has a geography.

I have been mapping it.

Here is the flat country

of the first weeks —

featureless, enormous,

no landmarks to navigate by.

Here is the sudden valley

of the third month,

when I thought I was through it

and found I was not.

Here is the strange plateau

where I lived for a year —

not happy, not unhappy,

just present, just continuing.

The map keeps changing.

That is the thing about grief:

you cannot draw it in advance.

You can only mark where you have been.

I am somewhere in the middle now.

The terrain is familiar

in the way that difficult terrain

becomes familiar — not comfortable,

but known.

I am learning to read

the landscape of loss

the way you learn to read

any landscape:

slowly, with attention,

without expecting it

to be other than it is.