It's not true that I'm always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I'm not are perhaps my worst. For then, although I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs- nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast time- but the atmosphere, the taste, of the whole thing is deadly. So with this. I see the rowan berries reddening and don't know for a moment why they, of all things, should be depressing. I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of sound. What's wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember...
Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead... I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned- I had warned myself- not to reckon on wordly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accepted it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination...
-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
***
I am finding that I can walk into class and laugh when a year 12 kid leaps up from behind his desk, snaps a photo of me mid-teaching, then return to his seat and says, "Sorry- photo for the Valedictory dinner. Carry on, miss".
Then, I wander back into a silent staffroom, and wonder why.
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