Since July 11, my brother's wife and I have talked every night before we go to sleep (that is to say, before I chemically induce sleep). For the first month after my brother's death, her beloved husband's death, we didn't really speak. We just sat and cried on the phone, 2000 miles dividing us but a gaping pit of pain uniting us. Most nights if she spoke at all, it was in such a hushed whisper I had no idea what she said. I'd just agree, and whisper, "I know. I know."
Now we talk using full sentences. Last night we were discussing new photos taken of my nephew, my brother's son, Rocky. He was with my mom, helping her read some books to him. My sister-in-law said that one of the photos in the series was painful to look at, that it seemed to her there was a deep sadness in her son's beautiful eyes. For a split second, I flashed forward through Rocky's life in the kind of time-lapse-projection you can do in your head because you've watched so much MTV. I pictured him growing up, in fatherless moments, with an unfathomable yearning for something, someone, he's knows so well, and not at all.
A writer friend sent me a note a couple of days ago. "Wanted you to know I'm thinking of you and your great ache." Crushing and beautifully well phrased, I thought. That's so right. It is a Great Ache.
This is our Great Ache. Like the country's Great War or Great Generation or the world's Great Books.
This got me thinking about all the Great Aches out there. Ours is our greatest pain, our headline struggle. But we are not alone. I flashed back to all those other families, sitting in that G-d-awful Intensive Care Unit waiting room in that Chicago hospital. They left with Great Aches of their own as well. Every day there are devastating diagnoses delivered like prize-winning blows to the gut. The wrong people die every day. Marriages and cars crash.
There are Great Aches of pure fiction, sole creations of lives unlived, should-have-lived. I have an old friend whose father died when he was an infant, who to this day struggles to find his father in everything he does, in every part of himself, his life, his work, his identity. That remains his deep, lifelong yearning.
And a remarkable young woman I know whose achievements soar beyond any rational understanding of success, who battles daily her mother's disapproval and harsh judgment, a Great Ache that threatens to tarnish it all.
There are Great Aches of loss of what we had, of regret for what we've done, of pain for what never was or never will be, of endings, real or imagined, of lives we shudda/cudda/wudda had; there are real and imagined rejections, identities thieved by the demons of practicality, insecurity, uncertainty or just lousy timing. There are the Great Aches of "if I had only," "why didn't I," "why did I," and "why me" or "why not me."
Your ache may not be mine. Mine may not be yours. I hope to G-d mine's not yours these days. Whatever they are or aren't, they will be.
I think I just wanted to say how deeply sorry I am. May we all, somehow, be healed.
