As Memoirs of a Geisha unfolds, the young Chiyo, having been bought into slavery by the matron of the geisha house, and unceremoniously told of her parents’ death, kneels in a pulsing, fetal heap of tears on the hard wooden floors of the okiya. As the scene peels open, Chiyo describes a poem at the local temple in her village called “Loss.” The poem “has three words, but the poet has scratched them out” for “you cannot read loss, only feel it.”

In writing this I have struggled to find a structure for the narrative to follow; grief has no structure, and it cannot be read. It is as C.S. Lewis cites in A Grief Observed:

“In grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?”

Henceforth, this piece will be structured by feeling. If it feels disorienting as you read, that’s because loss is disorienting. If it feels confusing, that’s because loss is confusing. If it feels uncomfortable, that’s because loss is uncomfortable. But, as I have found, and as I am finding on my best days, if I can sit with the disorientation, confusion, and discomfort of loss long enough, it can lead me to a greater appreciation of life and that the spiral C.S. Lewis describes can indeed bend towards the sun.

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/memoirs-of-a-griever/8000

These people are unafraid of walking with me through the mess of life, and are comfortable enough to let my dad’s stories live on in our conversations long after his life ended. Whether they are aware of it or not, these human beings normalize my story, and subtly invite me to feel whole in their presence — whole as a person who, for the rest of her life, will be learning how to miss and remember someone.

To me, this is an inheritance infinitely more meaningful than a sum of money. If “rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts,” and “the only gift is a portion of thyself,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson shouts from the pages of history, then I am a lucky woman to have inherited a portion of my dad’s humanity — which lives on in my own.