GRAFTON — When I get out of bed in these dark, winter mornings, I head straight for the woodstove.
My cat Marshmallow materializes out of her shadowy corner of the kitchen, where she keeps vigil in the night, waiting for the wee mice that sometimes emerge from the woodwork. She trots next to me, mewling, as I invoke the blessings of the fire gods and goddesses.
“Please, let there be coals.”
I kneel on the hearth, and Marshmallow sits beside me as I open the damper and vents. A bright bed of coals receives my offering of two medium-sized logs. The morning fire must burn small and hot to safely rid the stovepipe of creosote built up in the night.
I call on the ancient deities because they've been around longer than God and have more experience. Prometheus, Vesta, Hestia, Pele, Brigid, and a pantheon of others - they're fire specialists.
In the long-ago time, Prometheus worked for Zeus, the boss of the gods. Zeus owned all the fire in the universe and refused to share it with mortals. Prometheus saw that life on Earth would be substantially improved by heat and light, so he stole Zeus's fire from lightning and smuggled it to earth in a fennel stalk.
Zeus was infuriated. He chained Prometheus to a rock, where eagles picked at his liver every day. Because his liver was constantly revitalized, his suffering was eternal.
If there were ever a guy who had reason to believe that “no good deed goes unpunished,” it would be Prometheus. We should thank him for his sacrifice.
Brigid, the Celtic goddess of hearth and forge, poetry, childbirth, healing and unity, had an easier life. She was born with the dawn. The sun's rays streamed from her head at the moment of birth.
Some sources credit her with introducing the practice of keening, described in the dictionary as “wailing for the dead.” I hear it as a song of remembrance and a willingness to be with grief.
When the Christians showed up and edited the pagan myths to make them their own, Brigid was demoted and replaced by Saint Brigid, who might or might not have been a living person. Most people forgot the goddess.
* * *
The year my mother died, it might've been Brigid who led me to the hearth.
My mother's death made me an orphan. Many seasons passed before I began to re-balance and see and feel that my grief was ultimately transformative.
Listening to the stories of other orphans, many of them long grown, like me, I know my experience is not uncommon.
“I didn't really grow up until my parents were gone,” several middle-aged men and women have told me.
My mother died in May. By November, after the sweet condolence notes, the casseroles, and the cakes, I felt especially bereft.
I'd always loved November because of the light, because of the way the bare underpinnings of the land reveal themselves, freed from the cover of leaves.
But that November, nature's raw beauty didn't comfort me. I wasn't comfortable anywhere. I couldn't sleep in my bedroom, the cold room, and I couldn't sleep upstairs in the loft, the warm room. Both beds were too lonely.
Every night, I made a pallet of blankets on the floor in front of the woodstove and watched the fire through the glass window. The whispering sizzle of wood was a lullaby. The pulse of the flames rocked me to sleep.
I slept on the floor until December, when an old friend came for an extended visit. Then I was able to return to my bed in the cold room, and it didn't feel so cold.
* * *
This kind of grief will have its way with you. There's no “getting over it.” No “letting go” or “moving on.”
Misguided well-wishers may offer such “advice,” seeking to provide solace or diminish their own discomfort with death.
They may speak of “closure,” a word that should be erased from our vocabulary. Four days after 9/11, commentators on the airways were already using that word with mindless abandon, as if “closure” were an automatic reflex, as if we could simply drop a theater curtain on the loss of family and friends blown out of the sky.
In the tattered, leather-bound notebook I've carted everywhere since the 1990s, I recently found some notes I'd scrawled while listening to Dr. Dan Gottlieb's radio program Voices in the Family on public radio station WHYY. His guest was Jungian analyst and philosopher James Hillman.
A listener called and told Hillman that she was a poet and that she was having trouble “getting over” the death of her analyst seven years earlier.
Hillman gently asked, “If you're a poet, do you want to get over it? Aren't you asking for a place to put it, and return to it?”
* * *
I am still captivated by Hillman's questions. I interpret his words to mean that anyone, poet or not, can weave a life with all the materials we are given. Grief is rough cloth, scratchy and cumbersome to handle, but to leave it on the cutting room floor is to deny its rightful place in the heart.
I didn't remember Hillman's questions when I made my bed by the fire. I was propelled by what I can only describe now as primal longing.
It wasn't until the peepers began to sing in April that a glimmer of consciousness surfaced. All those November nights, some organic integration had occurred within me, unbidden, perhaps provided by the spirit of Brigid.
Hearth = Home = healing = unity = Mother and Father. With no conscious thought, I'd landed in a place where I could put my sorrow and my love.
My father taught me how to tend fire in our fireplace. He reminded me that opening the damper was always the first step; otherwise, the room would fill with smoke.
Then we inserted the crumpled newspaper, the kindling we'd collected from the woods behind our house, the logs taken from my grandparents' farm.
Daddy said we had to be respectful of fire, like wind and water and all things in nature. Respectful, attentive, and careful. Nature is kind, he said, and also fierce. Fire could bring you heat and light. It could also burn your house down.
I enjoy everything about heating with wood: stacking it in the summer, the deep-in-the-bones warmth it provides in the winter when I step inside after hours out in the weather, the mindfulness required to maintain a safe, efficient fire.
Now I see the hearth as a place where something new was forged, durable and everlasting.
Grief is an element of nature, and a privilege granted to everyone who has loved and been loved. It is not to be ignored or smothered.
Like fire and love, it must be tended with care. It is still impossible to say whether I was tending fire or fire was tending me.