“I want to write something beautiful or furious.”

— Elise M Powers

Was the first time you felt it when your favorite toy broke, or your doll went missing? Maybe when you cut that doll’s hair and realized it didn’t grow back like yours? Was it when the gray cat with the white M between its ears crawled beneath your family’s Pontiac for warmth in the dead of winter, and your father backed over it on the way to church? Was it when your mother told you she couldn’t play dolls, play jacks, play school because her insulin was low? Or when she couldn’t do much at all when she came home from the hospital after her first heart attack? Was it when you lay small in a hospital bed yourself, small at age 7 and 10 and 12 and 17, always small because hospitals make humans small no matter your size, and gave yourself over to the surgeons who would make you better by making you worse first? 

Was it when your first best friend moved away to California, or your pen pal stopped writing? Or when your family stopped being invited to Christmas? Was it when you realized you weren’t good enough for the team? Or maybe it was the time your friend told a friend that you liked a guy, and you heard that the guy said, I’m not going to prom with a fatso, and quite suddenly the person you thought yourself to be no longer was? Perhaps you first felt it when you worked so hard on that paper about the fall of the Berlin Wall, and got a C- Perhaps you first felt it when you worked so hard on that paper about the fall of the Berlin Wall and got a C-. Or maybe when you first sat small in an office chair in a conference room—because office chairs make everyone feel wrong sized—in a green polyester suit made for someone 10 years older than you, and knew just as they did before you even began that you wouldn’t get the job?

Most likely, don’t you think, it’s when the family dog died? Or the first dog you and he adopted together in your first house? Or have you been lucky? Maybe those things never happened at all. Or they happened, but you were too busy feeling everything else to feel it. To call it by its name. Maybe you’ve been waiting for it. Or maybe you haven’t, because until you’ve felt it, you don’t know what you’re in for. 

You might have had to wait until you signed the papers, because he no longer wanted what you both had wanted and maybe you still did. Or until she was born and you realized you didn’t feel anything except for it? Or he got sick that summer and was never the same after the seizure, so you carry it with you all day every day like a weight shackled to your heart. Certainly when you were two states away and your father was rushed to the hospital, and you were ready to jump into the car, only to learn that he was already gone? 

Maybe it’s simply come with age? With the days speeding by and you can’t catch them in your hand, and maybe not in your memory either? Maybe it’s when you finally know you can’t give everyone everything they need? Not him. Not her. Not them. You certainly couldn’t give them a life without it. There is nothing you can do to protect anyone from it. 

You should have known, but couldn’t until you did, that the first time you feel grief will be unlike the next, or the next. Each time will feel like the first. And knowing that, you’ll feel it even before the next first time arrives.

Maybe it’s simply come with age? With the days speeding by and you can’t catch them in your hand, and maybe not in your memory either? Maybe it’s when you finally know you can’t give everyone everything they need? Not him. Not her. Not them. You certainly couldn’t give them a life without it. There is nothing you can do to protect anyone from it. 

You should have known, but couldn’t until you did, that the first time you feel grief will be unlike the next, or the next. Each time will feel like the first. And knowing that, you’ll feel it even before the next first time arrives.