My raw truth.
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I have completed this for an honor project and thought I might share it.
Picture of the "Unutterable Grief " By Denice Goldschmidt (oil on canvas painting):
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For most people, this painting is simply depressing, but for me, it's also comforting in a sense. Sadly, my family only comes together to say goodbye to a loved one, so it is no surprise that grief becomes welcomed after a while. But it was not always this way. I recall about twenty years ago in Kingston, Jamaica. We were a close-knit family branching from a mighty tree, Olive, my maternal grandmother, Grandma Olive. My childhood memory is strongest when I reminisce on my maternal side of the family. My grandma, her twelve kids, and many grandkids lived in a small community known as Board Villa.
My memory of them was filled with happy food, sleepovers, storytelling, and many fish. Grandma Olive welcomed everyone, even strangers, with an open arm, and we all flocked around her, too engulfed in her warmth to be troubled by the outside world.
Monetarily, we weren't the richest but weren't poor either, we were rich in love and unity. Those days were probably the happiest days of my life. Then like a mighty wind, death knocked hard on our door, removing that warmth and leaving behind broken olive branches.
Up to this day, Grandma's funeral procession is the largest our community has ever seen, and from that day, the immediate family was never to be reunited except for nine nights-the nine days leading up to a funeral. Those nine days were the only instances I felt like my family was whole again, and we were transported back to the good old days when we were the strongest. With this tragic sensibility, I am left with the question that torments my sense of self: Am I a sentimentalist who only feels complete when my family suffers?
Sebastian Junger, who is an American Journalist, helps me to come to understand why grief is a bittersweet experience for me. In his book Tribe, Junger discusses the untold tales of tragedies and disasters, such as war, and how it unifies people in all societies. He explains how these circumstances stimulate the oneness and communal responsibility that Native American Tribes had in the earlier years. In the chapter "In Bitter Safety I Awake," Junger claimed that there is more to war than being inhumane and destructive since it encourages "ancient human virtues," and as such, war is addictive to survivors (77).
Grief has a similar effect. People will cross the Caribbean Sea and the borders of the fourteen parishes of Jamaica just to pay their final respect, or at least my family does. We all experienced the loss together and came as one to comfort each other.
Grief has proven to evoke values such as empathy, loyalty, unity, service, and charity. For instance, family members would come from overseas whenever there is a death. Most households willingly give up rooms and the comfort of their beds so that everyone would be in the same community for the funeral rituals.
