AUGUST 25
She sat there and began to learn patience, staring at the floor,
where a dusty track from the door of the sitting-room to the
door of the empty bedroom had been marked by rough,
heavy shoes.
—COLETTEThe writer is describing her mother’s attitude in the after-
math of her husband’s death. The service is over, the excite-
ment has passed. Now the long learning to Do Without the
presence of the loved one begins.
It is a task demanding the utmost patience, and a willing-
ness to look, again and again, at those paths and places
where the loved one walked, sat, lived, and slept, and does
so no more.
After my grandfather died, when I was eleven, one of the
most heart-wrenching things I recall was seeing his shoes
standing neatly by the closet door. They were black leather,
high-top, lace-up shoes, the leather configured with creases
and bumps that conformed to his feet and his walking. I was
accustomed to seeing them on his feet—and now they stood
empty.
The moods of grief, like the moods of the day or of the year, are to
be honored, and will pass.