And when he died, she wove him into poetry
That she chanted like spells…

I’m not  exactly  sure how it happened, but a few months after he died, after a seemingly endless stretch of time during which I could find no words to help me describe what life felt like inside my grief, all of a sudden, the words started coming. 

They would come one by one at first.  And like the rough surface which a snake uses to shed its skin, words would allow me to slip out of the moment I was in and pass on to the next.  

The essays I wrote during those first years serve as exoskeletons: each one taking  the form of a past version of myself.  And while I have more or less retained the same shape over the six years since he died, I have found that I have grown imperceptibly larger from the loss.  

Reading  my writings from those initial years of grief feels much like gazing at the artifacts of an ancient city; there are remnants and fragments of myself in them which serve as the foundation of what came after. It’s like looking at a geologic cross section of life.  

In one of my first essays written almost a year after he died, it was clear that  I had grown fed up with hearing how inspiring and beautiful John and I’s story was to others, and in the midst of this frustration I wrote that, “I wished with all my heart that I was the one hearing these stories,” and, “not the one telling them.”  

I wrote those words half a decade ago because I meant them.   But I also wrote them as someone who could  not yet grasp or understand the profundity of the stories she had been entrusted with.  

Luckily the words I wrote early in my grief took root somewhere out of sight as layers of time, experience, and insight covered over them.  And those roots grew deeper and have weaved and pushed their way upwards towards all the words that were written after them.  The words, and the stories that contain them, have threaded together somehow like the root systems of ancient trees, and now exist like a singular story…like a singular life. One that breathes in pain while breathing him back out into this world. 

Years ago, I could not see the gift of being the one to tell others about him. Of being the one still breathing out a story.  But I see it now:    

The ancient Greeks believed that every hero ever worth remembering needed one thing in order for their legacy to live on.  It wasn’t courage or virtue, even though many men died in the pursuit of them.    It wasn’t circumstance or faith.   It wasn’t fortune.  And it wasn’t chance.  

It was a poet. 

A storyteller. 

A person who knew their essence and  who could wrap them into verse and sing them back to life long after they died.  

The Greeks had a word for what the poets were charged with keeping alive:  Kleos.  It’s the light and glory of a person which shines through the stories told while remembering them.  

It was a  light and glory so bright, that it was believed even the gods, destined to live forever, envied mankind for it. The gods, it turns out, are more doomed than blessed by their immortality in this regard.  Confined to an existence without true sacrifice, without true suffering,  and without true risk…The gods grasp at what mankind easily has within its reach: living a life that is worthy of remembrance.  

So the hero and writer are inextricably bound to one another in this way.   

John could have left me as many things after he died.  He could have left me cynical.  He could have left me hopeless or faithless.  

Instead: he left me a storyteller.

He left me a poet.  

So what is the gift in that?  What do I now see in the stories I tell that I could not years ago?

In short:  I see everything in them.  

Mythologist Martin Shaw believes that stories act as shields which we turn to when facing the evils and darkness of this world.  We turn to them not to hide behind them, but to see the reflection of that which terrifies us in a different frame of reference.  Just like the mythic hero Perseus who, in an effort to avoid being reduced to stone or cinder, could only face Medusa by gazing on her from the reflection of his shield, we who live outside of these myths, in all our human frailty, cannot stare at the monsters of our world for too long without hardening, fragmenting, and breaking.

We need our stories to face them.

A story is a powerful thing it turns out: while comforting its listener, it protects its teller.   I’m not sure how this story, our story, has gone from one which I thought would destroy me to one which now protects me, but it has.  

So in the telling of our story, I have found a shield.  One which reshapes Grief, Rejection, Loneliness, Despair, or whatever other monsters may stalk this way and creep in the shadows.  One that protects.  

I have found a story that demands someone left to tell it.