This post was written by Brooke Farnsworth, a BYU Humanities Center student fellow.
In first grade, my over-active imagination convinced me that I could control water. The idea made sense—the ocean always seems to listen to my beckoning, churning and whirling in an attempt to follow my demands, and the rain would gradually increase if I simply willed it.
That same year, I learned about the water cycle. Hunched over the kitchen table, I cut and pasted outlines of clouds, precipitation, condensation, evaporation, and raindrops. Much to my disappointment, I learned that water does not simply obey the command of a six-year-old, but instead follows a cycle, moving in and out of the clouds, the ground, the air.
Walt Whitman explores this cycle of the life-giving force in “The Voice of the Rain,” where the speaker asks the rain, “who art thou?”. The rain gently reveals itself as “the Poem of the Earth…eternal I rise…upward to heaven, whence vaguely form’d, altogether changed, and yet the same.” [1]
His poem regards the nature of water as an independent force, constantly changing, but continually present. I find this same sentiment reflected amidst my struggles with love and grief.
A couple years ago, at the conclusion of my cousin’s funeral, I was asked to take home a bouquet of the funeral flowers because they wouldn’t survive the road trip home. The white lilies and chrysanthemums sat on my living room coffee table for three weeks. I changed the water almost every day and added homemade flower food to each refill.
The chrysanthemums wilted first.
I tried holding them up, pressing their petals together like my palms could keep them from dying, but even the lilies eventually slumped over the edge of the vase. I could not bring myself to throw them away. I just kept dumping the water, trying to keep it clean from the signs of the flowers’ end. They needed to exist; they were the last tangible thing I had.
Mold inched its way up the base of the stems, slowly creeping towards the flowers themselves—I eventually had to dump the flowers along with the water.
Six months later, we visited his grave, setting fresh flowers next to the small headstone. When he was buried, the snow nipped at our faces, seeped through our shoes, but in the time that passed, it had melted. Spring now chirped all around us, as the sun butterfly-kissed our cheeks. Grass covered the ground in a green so vibrant you could hear it photosynthesizing.
The water was gone—no indication of the frost that once stretched its body out across the dead grass. The only reminder of the previous howling winter was the huge tears plummeting like raindrops to the ground; I couldn’t seem to control them.
In moments like that, I considered love as a sort of purgatory. Human mortality bound me to the inevitably of loss. I felt impending grief hum in the background of every gesture of love and care. So, I faced a choice where loving meant grieving, but not loving meant not grieving, and grief seemed too heavy a burden after so much loss. Like with my flowers, I wanted to just change the water, keep things in my control. I wanted love to be permanent, never changing, and never losing the person I loved.
But then I consider the water cycle. I contemplate how the water changes form but is never really gone. Like the love I wanted to do away with when it shifted to grief, water doesn’t disappear; it just changes. I can love someone even when it feels like grief, and I can still recognize it as love in a different form—a different part of the cycle.
In my sophomore year of high school, a friend of mine passed away suddenly. I had written her a thank-you note three months before, but never gave it to her. I had assumed I would see her again because she was perfectly healthy, no indication of her impending death.
When I found out about her passing, the words dripped slowly down my throat like ice water and pooled, sinking in my stomach. It felt like waking up in the morning after having a bloody nose in your sleep—a stomach ache that simmers for a while and the faint taste of iron in your throat.
I stared at the note on my nightstand, a glaring indication of fraught love that needed to be buried deep in the ground, poured down the sink.
But the longer I stared with regret, the stronger my feelings of grief grew. I needed to do something with my grief, so I began to draft thank-you notes to anyone I could think of. I could not give her the note, but I could give them to others. I would leave a thank-you note for the custodian, for the carpool driver, even for the angry lady in the locker room who would lock us out so we couldn’t hide from P.E.
The grief then introduced itself as my love for my friend.
On the year anniversary of her death, I left flowers on the porch of her parents. Alongside them sat a thank-you note.
The love I had felt when drafting her thank-you note was not gone, but needed to reintroduce itself as grief. Just because it wasn’t raining, that didn’t mean the water had disappeared. When I trust that love will always return, it becomes less of a purgatory and more of a promise.
To return to Whitman’s poem, the rain concludes its answer with “and forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make and beautify it.” [1] When I consider the state of mortal love, I return to the construction paper water cycle I once crudely crafted. Jagged, yellow arrows point from condensation to precipitation to evaporation and back to condensation. The same water that kept my wilting flowers alive existed in the snow that heaved on top of us at my cousin’s burial. The same water that breathed vibrant greens into the grass once sat choking it as frost. The truth is love does mean grief, but it also means hope and growth and spring because the water will return—it will always follow the cycle.
References
[1] Whitman, Walt. “The Voice of the Rain,” Leaves of Grass, 1855.
