Grief staining backwards…

There is a line of narrative in one of my favorite Lucy Maud Montgomery books “The Blue Castle”, it has always remained with me and I have found myself pondering it anew recently. It reads as follows:

“Holmes speaks of grief “staining backward” through the pages of life; but Valancy found her happiness had stained backward likewise and flooded with rose-colour her whole previous drab existence. She found it hard to believe that she had ever been lonely and unhappy and afraid.”

Valancy is one of my favorite heroines and I highly recommend the book. If you are so unfortunate to only be able to find a copy that has a long introduction by a certain female Canadian professor…skip the intro, I find it full of projection and it will ruin the entire story. Clip it, snip it, rubberband it, and move on to enjoy the story.

I started to hunt for the author of the quote that Montgomery used…had a hunch that it was drawn from a real literary figure….its was, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr.  Montgomery would have been about 20 when Holmes died in 1894. She pulls from an essay he had written September of 1861. He is writing of the civil war and the effect of war and death on a nation, on a people, on individuals…it is titled “Bread and the Newspaper” and can be found in “Pages from an Old Volum of Life: A Collection of Essays”.  (His essay following the one noted is a fascinating read for Civil War buffs.)

“When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do.  The same trains of thought go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show.  Now, if a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years.
This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of
April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before as through all those which we have already turned.

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these!  Yet, not wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking from peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we cannot at first think what,–and then groping our way about through the twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful.  Many have the feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is, after all, only a dream,–if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed grief is unreal.”

Holmes and Montegomery paint such poignant, visual pictures of grief and joy. Holmes writes in a lyrical way that great events do stain backwards over the pages of life we have have already turned. Its true, grief does stain backward, we can no longer look back at joyous events without our hearts being gripped by grief, it is as if the storehouse of our hearts have been plundered and violated…frames shattered, pictures slashed, memories once vibrant are now colored in gray and black. Is it possible that a future joy may “stain backward” and once again right the colors like Valancy experienced, or will we always wear black inside?  Holmes captures perfectly the first few moments of waking, it is an ugly bird perched on our pillow that we awake with, he describes the waking hours true also…the wish that the grief be unreal, the disonance in your mind that leaves one unable, at times, to process the simplest of thoughts or more than a few lines of reading.

At times it is too much for my mind to wrestle with, especially the sense of unease that permeates my waking hours.  Troubled by the unkindness in the world, life is hard, why do we complicate it with things that don’t matter, small petty nonsense that in the light of eternity simply does not matter?  We hold on to ideals, perceptions, goals that aren’t real and we are mean spirited and grouchy in the pursuit of them. We ungraciously add our weight to another’s already heavy cross, instead of slipping our shoulder under it to help.

But oh the great graces of a single Mass that bring pardon and peace, reconcillation and reunion to our lives. Monday evening’s Mass this week was so full of life. We nearly filled the Daily Mass Chapel and we were “kids from 1 to 93” just like the Christmas song. We were blessed with more than a handful of faith-filled twenty-somethings, holy young adults full of energy, young families, middle somethings…inbetweens, our “seniors” who are amazing in their steadfastness despite what life and advanced age throws at them, and the cutest baby in the world, hands down…dark curls, dark eyes, chubby little toes…he makes me smile.  There is peace and serenity in the chapel, the presence of our Lord soaks in and heals all the ragged edges, I hear the happy baby noises and continue to smile.

Heaven reaches down and lifts us up into eternity at Mass, for those brief moments the pain subsides and there is union with all those who have died, a wholeness is felt, a promise given of an eternal banquet where we won’t ever have to say goodbye again.