SORROW

     Sorrow is a thread in the tapestry of every human life.   It grows as we grow, like bone, along the lines of stress.

     Happiness can be bliss; that is, relatively mindless; but it takes grace to be happy after the loss of a loved one or the end of a cherished dream.

     Majesty of spirit, can it be achieved without sorrow?   Overcoming sorrow should be taught as a life skill ... it cannot be, of course, since many young students would have to feign it.

     After a certain age one finds enough sorrow in the world that only the hardest of hearts can escape it.   The formless anxiety many of us feel must surely come from the cries of those who die untimely deaths -- be they children, whose in their prime, or the aged ... or the great forests.

     Sorrow has a role.   I doubted if Francis really loved Fred.   She hardly cried after he died.   But it has been years now and still she speaks his name reverently and teases his absent self.

I watched the breaved Jim at the funeral of Jim jr.   I saw how tragedy stripped the insulation from his heart and left his love naked for us to see, like fractured bone peeking through the wound.

Those who live a life without sorrow are like greenhouse plants; a beautiful green, tall and leggy.   Set them outside and when the storm arrives, as surely it will, they are the first to fall.

     Sorrow is a necessary nutrient.