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"...I don't know what we are going to do...."

Yes you DO know what you are going to do. You don't want to know--you want this cup to be taken from you--- but you KNOW.

You will stand up on achy, unwilling legs and hold back the avalanche of despair which is threatening your whole family. Every stomach-turning day you will get up and put one foot in front of the other. You will flex the unwilling muscles in your hands and face. You will perform the unbearable routines of everyday life even though your mind is engulfed in chaos. You will stiffen your weary spine so the unformed spines of your children will not be crushed under the weight. You will face down the monsters of despair, grief, rage and lethargy because your family--living and dead--needs you to do so. You will muscle your way through the sea of well-meaning people who will attempt to tame your wild grief and who will murder you over and over with their dissections of your wound; people who will say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time--as I am doing, perhaps. You know all this.

You know what you are going to do.

In a Dark Time
Theodore Roethke,

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Morning intention bump.

(Thanks for that, by the way. Was it you or Cornelis brought someone up short on a thread once with a quote from someone who censured another for wailing like a pagan when, as a Christian, they knew better? This hit home with me because for a couple of years there, I did just that. Wept and wailed for nearly a week straight once when my fairy godmother died and we all gathered together at Palais Jamis to await her wake like walking dead who read the Lament of the Moths by day and drank ourselves to sleep under the stars each night. That was then.)