Behind the Barghest — Jillane E. Purrazzi

It seems appropriate that this blog is falling on National Grief Awareness Day. Not that we need to bring awareness to grief.

Strange, how something so essential to the human experience, something we will all experience, is so set apart and alien. Death is part of everything we do. As human beings mortality is part of our very nature. A ticking clock. A deadline. A reminder that every breath is one breath closer to the last.

Once as a child I got irritated at the constant need to breath. I remember hiding under the blanket, trying to stop breathing and train my body how to stop the irritating necessity. I didn’t understand why it had to happen.

I was reminded of that feeling as I sat in the hospital room, watching my Mom adjust the air tubes helping her get enough oxygen to her slowly deteriorating body. For something so natural, death is so foreign.

Last week marked a year since her passing. I’ve stopped waiting for her to come home, but I still have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that the world doesn’t hold her anymore.

Grief is a strange feeling. I thought I knew what it would be. I’d felt loss before. I’d felt sorrow. We’ve all seen the movies where someone dramatically yells “NO” after someone they love leaves. Or read books where they refuse food or water.

Grief is something different. There is an emptiness, yes. Something that belongs is just not there anymore. Like reaching out in bed for a blanket and finding only cold air. Like stepping for that next rung in the ladder and falling.

But it’s also a presence. Something hanging over your shoulder, waiting for a quiet moment where it comes to sit with you. Something that feels like fear, but also something that comforts you. Because the grief doesn’t let you forget. And if the one you are missing isn’t there, at least the grief is.

No wonder death is embodied in so many cultures. No wonder we see ghosts. No wonder the Barghest haunts our steps. Something has to fill the black hole that is left when something is ripped so suddenly from the world.

When I first came up with the idea of The Eyes of The Barghest, it wasn’t meant to close in on that feeling. But I say I write exploratory fiction. More importantly, I feel like, so often, God chooses to speak to me through my writing. Never more so than when I don’t want to listen.

So I started writing.

I began with the fear that had been plaguing me, that I would never be able to remember my Mom without falling first on the worst memories. I wanted to remember her how she deserved to be remembered, not the way she was at the end.

From there the concept grew. As I wrote the emotions overflowed onto the page in layers on layers of pain and joy. I began to see the beauty again, and I began to understand what I couldn’t put into words. Grief will be at my shoulder every day. But one day I will turn and embrace it and go home, and perhaps them, I will fully understand. Until then, I will sit with it in the quiet moments, and find the face of God there somehow.

I hope this story will be used to help someone else too.

Originally published at http://www.jillanepurrazzi.com.