Good Grief?

Funny how it sneaks up on you, grief. You go along just fine for
weeks, months at a time...sometimes even for years, and then,
BAM! out of the blue it hits, knocking the wind right out of you...
hitting you between the eyes...pummeling you relentlessly until
you are against the ropes, begging for mercy.

That's how it felt last evening. It began as I was listening to a
young man on YouTube singing "Bring Him Home" from Les Mis, 
a song which always stirs deep emotions. And then, a little
later at bedtime, at the end of an emotional day in which I had
presided at the memorial service for a young man of twenty-
one who had been part of our congregation...as I turned out the
light and lay down to sleep, I found myself weeping, sobbing in
a way I had not done in a very long time...my body wracked with
the spasms of weeping- for the family today, for my eldest son,
dead now these twenty-one years...feeling once again that deep
bereftness which comes from having a chasm within your heart
which no one or nothing else can ever totally fill. 

Grief, you see, is a deviously cunning entity, fading into the
shadows around the edges of everyday life as time passes...
less and less present, or so it seems...lulling you into a false
sense of security but never actually going away...lurking just far
enough off center stage that when it makes an entrance, you
are caught totally by surprise, knocked for the proverbial loop
by the out-of-the-blue blow to the solar plexus, and suddenly
you are a sobbing, soggy mess, soaking your pillow with an
ocean of tears, the wrenching sobs convulsing your body with a
deep, down-to-the-toes ache which simply won't go away...at
least not until the last tear has been shed, the last sob
wrenched out, leaving you limp and spent, as Grief slinks away,
the victor returning to his corner, only to come back again
another day.