Grief is just love with nowhere to go

Instantly, I felt I’d lost something. My friend and foe, my mind, my marbles, my sense of the world.

At the very same time I found something, something I wasn’t looking for, something that was to overwhelm me in the days that followed.

Grief.

Four souls in total perished and a chill went through my body as I stood there, open-mouthed, tearing up.

Walking up Clanbrassil Street earlier that morning I was a millionaire but worried. The 50 pounds my mother gave me at the weekend was still burning a hole in the pocket of my black corduroy Levis. I needed to break it and approaching Leonards Corner my worry had doubled.

I should have bought the paper. That would have broken it, that would have been acceptable. I’d have got no glares from shop assistants, no looks of it’s too early for you to be taking all my change. I would have been furthering my knowledge of the big, bad world before I even got to college. Nothing to worry about, nothing to see here.

The looks on the ashen faces of my classmates as I arrived in the college bar led me to believe that something was amiss, that my weak and worthless worry was about to shrink in size.

Jason, chiselled chin and not a pick on him stood to ask me had I seen the paper. Of course not, I was too worried.

“I’m sorry man,” he said.

Niamh was dead, killed instantly in a head-on collision the previous evening just outside Charleville and I’d just seen the paper.

As I shuddered and stumbled to sit down my mind moved to memories of laughing alongside her, lying on her bedroom floor and loving the life she lived to the full, her family and friends – the warmest people now struggling to come to terms with the coldest reality of all.

Niamh was dead.

A force of nature, she transcended the divide in our class between city and country. She didn’t care. She was fabulous and fearless, determined and dedicated, soft and sharp, laden down with love and an unmistakable lilt.

She was her own woman. She was Niamh. She was gone.

Grief would fill the void for many hours and days to come but its presence was not unwanted, not for my part.

 “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in the hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

– Jamie Anderson

Silently seated in a car full of sorrow on the way to a wake I never thought I’d make, I remember seeing signs for the ‘O’Herlihy funeral’ nearly an hour from the house. Like the ones you’d see nowadays for any wedding of note.

This was going to be no ordinary evening, and so it came to pass.

Laid out in the front room where I’d watched them rehearse and master the music they loved, Niamh and Anita, sisters, side by side, two wooden boxes.

Overwhelming grief washed over me once I found the courage to show my face.

Their beautiful bodies, cold to the touch. Almost paralysed with pain, their proud parents stood with open arms. I tried to speak but couldn’t, so I wrapped myself in their warm embrace.

And stayed there, momentarily.

“She loved you so much,” Niamh’s brother Joey wailed.

Mutual my friend, mutual.

The world squeezed as much sadness as possible into the hours and days that followed.

Weeping punched heart shaped holes in the autumnal air but its presence was not unwanted, not for my part.

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”

– Adrienne Rich

Slowly walking arm in arm with Michelle to the graveyard, and having helped to carry the coffin a few steps myself, it struck me how many people wanted to be a part of such a sorrowful occasion, how they wanted to be close to those ground down with grief.

As the wind bit and the rain came down in sheets the sense of togetherness was impossible to ignore. As we stood in silence at the graveside, everyone wanted to put the pieces back together and return to normality, a normality that now seemed so far away.

With the prayers of the priest drawing to a close the rain packed it in and the wind put away its puff. The sun came out and I’m sure a rainbow stirred in the sky above the mourners, making some squint.

A ruddy faced man, well-built but broken too, took it upon himself to fill the air with song, just as the last roses landed on the coffins.

And I’ll never forget it. Or her.

“The water is wide, I cannot cross over, And neither have I wings to fly, Give me a boat that can carry two, And both shall row, my love and I.”