Grief and Gratitude
Gabriel Westreich ’22
It struck him immediately as he woke. With a slow, casual roll-over, James’s body shifted from the interior of his bed, which was against the wall, towards the other side, which exposed his view to the mirror parallel to his bed frame. “I don’t like what I see,” he thought. The image reflecting back at him showed a young man, of about 25, leaning on his right side with his left arm hanging loosely over his sheets. He dreaded the effort it would take him to pull back his sheets and swing his hurting feet to the ground. “Reality,” he thought, “is not where I want to be.” James was a dreamer, or at least that’s what everybody told him. With his constant inability to stay focused, he often found himself drooling over his desk, thinking about what could be, and thinking about what life was and wasn’t. Every so often, he’d get shaken back to reality with the loud “THUD” that came from his boss dropping a massive stack of paperwork on his desk. “You’re doing it again!” his boss would yell. “Get outta lala land and get back to work!” He wondered why, oh so constantly, his life was the way it was. As his senses came back to him more and more, he looked up to his left at the high right corner of his tiny studio apartment. The clock showed 10:30, yet he felt like it was nighttime. All of time had become dark like the night to him, and he trotted through each day without any enthusiasm or desire for anything. He swung his bleary, blood-shot gaze once more back to the mirror, and with that same left arm picked the fabric from his carpet piece by piece. Due to the weight of his body and gravity, he began to feel the tingling sensation go up from his pointer finger through his wrist, then to his elbow, finally reaching an abrupt stop at his shoulder, and it all felt numb. James lay there a while longer, until he thought of something that hadn’t crossed his mind for who knows how long. He got caught in a trance again, but this time his mental image cast a light on his surroundings, similar to the glow that comes with the warm, intoxicating display of daybreak on a warm spring morning. It engulfed his consciousness, and he felt what seemed like a live shudder go through his body, and he felt the tension and elasticity rush back to his muscles, only instants after his prolonged numbness. He was thinking of his mother. Ever since she had gotten sick three years before this, and passed, James had made it his number one priority to stack his life with such work and distraction that he wouldn’t have the time to think of her. He didn’t want to fall into the dread and negativity of the grieving process, yet for some reason, on this morning, he felt that it was necessary. He knew she wasn’t with him anymore, but it didn’t matter to him. His memory raced back to all the times when he was a young boy and his mom would be waiting at the door for him with open arms, after a long day of school. “She was beautiful,” he thought, “and the most loving individual I ever knew.” He was staring at the dimmed ceiling light directly above his eyes at this moment, and the tipped brass of the light shell became blurry in his gaze as his peripheral vision clouded 2
