Melancholia

Growing up, I used to experience a strange feeling I never told anyone about.

I might have been playing, or eating dinner, or having fun, or talking with my parents—something normal, something mundane.  And in the middle of that ordinary life, I’d be overcome with a strange melancholy.  Not sadness: there was nothing to be sad about, in those particular moments.  Not grief.  Not sorrow.

Melancholy.  A lingering sadness borne of a loss I couldn’t remember or hadn’t experienced.  Something close to nostalgia, but with less sweetness.  Memory half-recalled.  The sensation closed my throat every time, almost made me well up.

But it passed quickly.  So quickly I wondered if I had ever experienced it at all.

I chalked it up to a lot of things over the years.  Hormones.  Difficult days.  Strange instances of, as Wordsworth might have it, spontaneous overflows of emotion recollected in tranquility.  But it returned, over and over.

After a span, I realized that although that sensation occurred randomly, I could also produce it in myself to a certain faint degree.  That feeling is the feeling that always cracks me open watching or reading The Lord of the Rings, or playing through a particular abandoned city in a beloved video game.  I recognize that sensation reading The Wanderer or listening to Anuna’s Suantrai and Clamavi de Profundis’ music.

Longing, is what it is: for what is lost, and for all that is yet to come.

Strange, the way years lay on us and what they expose over time.  I was never much for crying.  Though my mother wept at commercials and Hallmark cards and kind gestures, I—without ever really trying—developed a sort of emotional stoicism.  It was my job to pat her back while she fumbled for tissues in her purse.

I grew more emotional with the passing of years, more prone to tear up over this or that.  But losing my mother turned me into one raw exposed nerve, and two years later I haven’t entirely recovered.  Like her, now I well up over everything and nothing at all.

Some of that is grief, I know.  For her.  But the rest, I think, is a deeper grief, too—for all things.

I kept my crying polite when she died.  I broke down with my husband in private, of course, but for the most part I wept politely and dabbed at my eyes with tissues.  This was to avoid freaking out my father, who didn’t seem to know how to handle my own grief on top of his own.  This was so, in no small measure, I could fill my mother’s shoes, and take care of the people who were missing her, even if I was one of those people.

But what I recall most vividly of grief emerged weeks after her funeral, long after the stream of condolences and caretaking had stopped.  Late at night, when I was alone and couldn’t sleep, my entire body would seize up in some paroxysm of pain, and I would…  I don’t know what to call it.

It wasn’t weeping or crying or even sobbing.  It was far more guttural and from far deeper and sometimes with no tears at all, a grief-stricken howl into my pillow that would last until I needed to stop for air and then start again on every inhale.  

I don’t know how to describe that experience: a vein of lament sliced open and bled out until nothing remained. It was sadness for my mother: it was also something more, sadness about all of it, a deep grief at having to live in a world where this happens, at having to live in a world that is sad and broken, at having to live with loss and sorrow and death and sickness and suffering.

Looking back, I see those moments as holy.  Some of the holiest, perhaps, of that time and of my life.

I have experienced nothing like them since.

I’m not sure I would be capable of it, really.  The body is not meant to remain perpetually in that state.  But I can tie that agonized purging back to the longing I experienced and still do.  I wonder: do we all in some way sense the disjunction between what is and what ought to be?  Do our souls and our bodies know at a level beyond cognition? 

I suspect we do.

In the quietest places, we know.  We can sense it, all that has been ruined and all that will be restored.  In moments of grief, in moments of contemplation or inspiration, we can summon that ancient memory—the great grief of humanity that echoes back to the vast sorrows of God.  We can feel, in heart and memory, the break in the bone.

I no longer run from it the way I used to do.

As a child I hated that feeling.  It interrupted the fun, the normal day-to-day.  I perceived it as an anomaly, a disruption.  But now, at the times I feel it, that sense is the truest thing about me: the thinnest place in my spirit, where God’s truth meets my perception.  The understanding of what is and is not.  The recognition that of the loss-that-isn’t-lost: of a pain that feels unyielding but is not eternal. 

And above all, the recollection of home that is for me and that I don’t yet know.