I took myself to the movies yesterday, to see "Wild". I'd loved the book, and the film is a faithful adaptation. Cheryl Strayed is an extremely honest and transparent writer, and a beautiful one. Her saga of a journey to redemption is poignant and easy to empathized with. I was struck by how like a Buddhist retreat it was. The profound silence, the quick read of other people encountered without benefit of background or facts. The horror of facing oneself and one's fears. The trust that gradually develops that inside us we have that best self and can learn to access it.
Strayed's grief at the death of her mother was beyond words or fixing. She had to face it. I've been experiencing similar grief at the death of my brother, so I was really identified with her struggle. But my big deaths happened at 29, when my best friend killed herself, and my parents sudden deaths when I was forty, and three deaths, all suicides, in the last couple of years. I was older, and I had more skills so that I didn't choose self destructive paths. I can see how someone as young as she was would become unmoored. But she did have her ex-husband and a good friend who helped her remember who she was, and she found the strength of her mother to see her through.
But she needed to silence her speech, garner all her strength, rail at the world, and hurt physically in order to cleanse her psychic pain. Sometimes right speech is silence. The other night, at my writing group, when asked what was up with me, I said I didn't want to talk about it. My group respected that. What is there to say? There is only feeling, and trusting our survival in the face of overwhelming grief. Some don't survive. But most of us, we turn towards the pain, experience it, let it wash through us, and appreciate being alive. We're awake in the dark wide river of life.
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