I must begin by announcing that this piece is written as a personal reflection on my own ongoing struggle with an axiom. The axiom is as such, all human relationships (or non-human by that matter) will end in grief and despair. This has caused significant anxiety on a daily basis to arise at spontaneous moments throughout my day and night. Mainly I see what I can only describe as ghosts from the future. Specters from timelines that only my imagination could construct. Distant phantoms that have come too close as to cause shivers to run down the spine. To further that, I will need to describe the foundations of these apparitions.
I do not wish to dive in too deep so that this does not become a survey of grief and despair. I want to isolate and identify some of the different types of grief and their levels. There is the typical idea of stages of grief but for that matter I leave to the psychologists. I will be particularly looking at grief as the fading of relationships, fear, and as the antithesis of hope.
Time is death. All must and will die. If a relationship survives past the point of petty acquaintances and friends that seem too fond of the story of Brutus, then it becomes hardened and tried by fire. Allies in the same battle. People who no longer say I am alone but now we are two or three or so on. But for these people no matter how strong a bond is formed, no matter how sharp of iron each other has crafted the other, the time will come. With softer friendships, they tend to end with a slow fading away where the joy found in someone saying "wow you too!" proceeds into the melancholy of memories. Friendships will end, prepare.
Speaking of memories, they usually begin is a familiar place. Family relations also suffer the same fate. Water is thick but blood is thicker, then again, water tends to be more abundant than blood. Too many times, the bludgeon of pettiness and envy seeps into the cracks of family bonds. Too many times families steal away the youth of younger in order to fill their own cup to the fullest with new wine. Prostituting their own child to fulfill their unsatisfied dreams. He'll be a lawyer one says, no a baseball star says another. The only person being played is the kid. This is what leads to grief or at least a particular form of it. This form represents the idea of living a life that is not of your choosing. There is no anticipation of the future. The difficulty is this is only realized after the fact and not prior.
The grief that I should identify now is dread. Dread is a particularly interesting topic due to people's fascination with the horror genre. I myself maybe included with those people to some degree but the idea around it is the doom and gloom. The protagonist is usually left with some Hobson choice that allows for few options. None of the options are ones to be filled with much hope. The opposite is true with it being fear.
"I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect-in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition-I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR." - Edgar Allen Poe
The grief of fear is the idea that hope is long dead and gone. All that is left is to face the grim coming reality of danger looming over head. The only possible solution would be to meet the danger out of your own volition rather than just taking whatever it may give. This the exact point in which we call the emotion of despair. It is the antithesis of hope.
There is where we will camp for now. To understand despair, we must understand what it means for hope to be lost. Hope is, for lack of better terms, is to cherish a desire with anticipation. We can see this in the child's eyes when the expectation of a gift is in the future. It is not specifically the gift that we receive which we desire but they joy and happiness we will from that offering. I think one can have hope in both dimensions of receiving and providing a gift. The hope that the receiver accepts the gift well and the giver gives a decent gift. Both admonish the idea of hope and then to its counterpart, if someone gives a gift and then takes it away for someone else or a gift is rejected by the receiver, I can only define the emotion that follows from as despair.
Now back to the definition of hope, there are three ways in which it can fail. The three being, something or someone is not cherished, the enshrinement of a different desire that is not for the sake of goodness, and when there is no anticipation. Failure of the first occurs when love is absent. The second occurs when desires have become corrupt. The last arrives with the lack of imagination. All I must say when it comes to overcoming despair is that you must find a hope that fits the aforementioned categories. For me that is God in his entirety. I can only pray that prior to despair that you, the reader, find something to hold onto for hope. If not, you can not and will not overcome despair when it arrives. So prime yourself for grief. The night will come as assuredly as the day.
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