Boxes of Imagined Grief

 My friends didn’t know what to say to me because Ev died young and unexpectedly. No one had taught my generation about grief, not what to say or do or expect. No one knew to tell me that life was over as I had known it, or that I would be thrown into a land cratered by death for more than a year.

 

Yet everyone had a Box of Imaginary Grief, even if they had never lost anyone close, filled with odds and ends of what they thought sorrow might be like. Whenever I came over, they dug around in their box, took out something braided with hope, and handed it to me to comfort my grief. Then they expected the dinner party to go on as planned. As you might have guessed, this wasn’t what I needed. 

 

Father and Son Boxes

A box is a box is a box, Gertrude Stein kind of said. Or Pu-Tai. But a smiling box, well, that’s something else.

Being a son is sitting inside a box just as being a father is. (I imagine the mother-daughter relationship has similar boxes.)

There’s a Father box for how men are expected to act in relation to their sons, basically the law-giver box. You do what I say!