Grief keeps its own hours

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20

/ pick one

three cards, and one of them knows which absence has been in the room this week

left, middle, right, chosen quickly and without deliberating. your reading is at the bottom, under today's card, so it takes a scroll to reach. go gently with this one if it lands close.

not all missing is the same kind of missing, and the three below are quite different animals. what they have in common is that none of them announce themselves. they arrive as tiredness, or irritation at something unrelated, or a flat afternoon with no cause you can name.

today's energy is quieter than the rest of the week. five of cups sits with what is gone, and the odd thing about grief in your fifties is that it rarely arrives on the dates it is supposed to.

it keeps its own hours. it comes in a supermarket aisle because of a brand of biscuit. it comes on an ordinary thursday in august and skips the anniversary entirely, which people then take as evidence that they are handling it, or not handling it, depending on which way they are inclined to judge themselves.

the mistake almost everyone makes is treating a wave of it as a setback. it is not progress lost. grief that still moves is grief attached to something that mattered, and the alternative to feeling it is not peace, it is numbness, which costs more over a decade than the crying does over an afternoon.

august has a hand in it too. the light changes, the year turns over, and something in us counts backwards without being asked. if today has an unexplained heaviness in it, that may well be all the explanation there is.

what is worth leaning into today: letting it have the twenty minutes it is asking for. grief given a little room is far more reasonable than grief kept waiting.

what is worth staying away from: grading yourself on how you are doing with it. there is no correct timetable, and the woman who thinks she is behind is usually the one who has been carrying it most carefully.

my advice for today: say the name out loud once, to nobody in particular. that is all. it does something that thinking about them does not.

if there is a name, you can send it to me. nothing more than the name if that is all you want to write, and no story needs to come with it.

option one. the six of cups

yours is a date nobody else marks. it goes past every year and the world does not slow for it, and you have long since stopped mentioning it because the mentioning became more work than the missing.

the thing that helps here is smaller than people expect. mark it yourself, deliberately, in some way that takes ten minutes. an anniversary that has nowhere to go turns into a low grey mood that lasts a fortnight. one given a shape tends to keep to its own day.

option two. the two of cups

yours is a person who is still alive. that is the loss nobody brings a casserole for. an estrangement, a friendship that ended without an argument, someone who is well and busy and simply not in your life any more.

it is harder to put down than the other kind, because it stays theoretically fixable and so you never quite get to mourn it. you are allowed to grieve something that has not been declared over. doing so is not giving up on it, and it usually makes you steadier if the door does open later.

option three. the queen of cups

yours is not sharp any more. it has turned into tenderness, which is why you have been moved to tears this month by adverts, by a song in a shop, by somebody being kind to a stranger in a queue.

people are quick to call that fragility. it looks to me a great deal more like what grief becomes once it has been carried properly for long enough, and it arrives with something worth having. you notice more than you used to. the people around you feel it, even the ones who could not tell you what has changed.