When All Is Said

by Anne Griffin

I wish now I’d wrapped my arms around you and cried on your shoulder and given you the chance to do the same. But no, I didn’t have the room for your grief as well as my own, it seemed.

it’s worse as you get older. It’s like we tunnel ourselves deeper into our aloneness. Solving our problems on our own. Men, sitting alone at bars going over and over the same old territory in their heads. Sure, if you were sitting right beside me, son, you’d know none of this. I wouldn’t know where to start. It’s all grand up here in my head but to say it out loud to the world, to a living being? It’s not like we were reared to it. Or taught it in school. Or that it was preached from the pulpit. It’s no wonder at the age of thirty or forty or eighty no less, we can’t just turn our hand to it.