Grief's Country by Gail Griffin

Author:Gail Griffin [Griffin, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, SOC036000 Social Science / Death & Dying, LAN005060 LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Writing / Nonfiction (incl. Memoirs)
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2020-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

. . . at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns:

And till my ghastly tale is told,

This heart within me burns.

He must disgorge his story to chosen strangers, after which he is left free—but only until his tale rises again, like magma, demanding utterance. On to the next hapless auditor.

I can’t bear to tell the story of that night, and I can’t bear not to. To tell it takes me so close to the river’s edge that my stomach churns and clenches; not to tell it is to stand in a cocoon of silence, watching the world sail away. I tell it to establish who I am now: the person to whom this occurred, the one who has lived, is always living, through this; the person who has this memory in her head, and this great rift across her life. And I tell it to bring it indoors, into the realm of language and experience where it can begin to work its way into my story, my being. As long as it remains in the hallucinatory realm, so do I. Yet telling it will always feel perilous, vertiginous, as if I am about to drop into my own maelstrom.

The hapless Guest—drawn off-course on his way to a wedding as I was yanked off-planet on my way from a wedding—is said to wake the next day “a sadder but a wiser man.” But sadness seems an odd response to the outlandish story. And what wisdom could he possibly have taken from it? Certainly not the tidy morsel offered by the Mariner:

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