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Grief visited me just the other day. “Welcome,” I said. “Come in, I can make us rose-hip tea. It is good and will keep you refreshed.” I am not normally open to the idea of surprise visitors. Yet what would you, dear reader, have done if a visitor—and not necessarily a stranger—comes calling at your door?

My discomfort with uninvited guests is linked to my discomfort with speech. My own speech has become simplified, and words weighty. “What can words do,” I ask. I had resolved to a very simplified manner of speaking akin to my childhood. I was rejecting words, but I also was not happy about it. I detested this about myself. Perhaps of all things I detest about myself, my manner of speech would rank in the top three, alongside my dwelling over a recent separation. There are many subjects that narrate the story of grief, and among them, the most significant could be Grief and Love, coupled and deeply ingrained in my mind, following me everywhere I go, alongside the image of the children.

A child lies dead underneath the rubble. For her, I am grieving. Thousands of children with torn limbs.

I left Grief to go make us tea. I stood in front of the kettle watching and waiting for the water to boil. I watched my distorted reflection in the mirrored aluminum kettle-body. My head significantly larger than the rest of me, and all of you in the background.

I daydream while waiting for the water. A comet fell from the sky yesterday and although we stayed awake—the night owl, the locust and I—waiting to catch a glimpse of it, the comet evaded us from behind the clouds. The following morning, my body is heavy, and my mind, troubled. My eyes are on fire. Fire for tears. Grief is here, but I am not able to grieve yet. Grief showed up at my door and doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave.

Is it a coincidence that Grief’s visit comes after Forgetfulness visited a few days ago? When I asked Forgetfulness, “how do you grieve?” it lowered its head, closed its eyes and vanished.

I returned with the tea I prepared, and I found Grief sleeping in the middle of the room. It was a good thing I didn’t trip over his body. I write about Grief in the masculine because although I imagine him shifting between genders, not indebted to any, I currently desire to write about him in the masculine. This is not the same masculine I think about when I think about my mother’s grief over the loss of her brother, or my own grief over my recent break-up.

Detach yourself, I hear myself saying as I stand above Grief’s sleeping body and recount my own separation dramas. True, you did leave him, but you were grieving long before the break-up, weren’t you?

With eyes wide open, Grief has been watching me, standing with tea in hands, lost to my imagination. “Is that what I look like on your face?” he chuckles before continuing to say, “You know I can read your mind!”

*

Another morning, and Grief is here, waking up in my house, ruffling around in my kitchen in his pajamas, making me coffee just how I like it, bitter.

“What are you really doing here,” I asked.

“I’ve come to be with you for a while,” was his reply, “you called for me after all!”

In a small workshop in a mountain village in Italy, a woodcarver has been working with wood for a larger part of his life. I walk in and find him in the act of making, holding a tree piece in his hands, in silence and intimate testimony. His head is slightly tilted to the attention of his craft, and I realize as I come closer that he is crying. His tears move down his face, pulled downward in a straight line to the wood in his hands. He is oblivious of my presence and continues to carve and cry. The thirsty wood in his hand is quenched by the tears from his eyes. My own eyes swell with tears, and I walk away. I tell myself never to look back, but that was thirty years ago and not a day goes by where I don’t walk into that workshop all over again.

“Won’t you keep me company?” Grief interjects.

He has no nerve to ask for more of my attention. And yet, I find myself readily eager to concur. “I cannot promise that this will be entertaining,” I reply, “but now that you mention it, there is something that might keep you company. A story.”

I don’t hesitate for a second because I know Grief will find a way to distract me with his thirsts and longings.

“Once upon a time,” I begin, “there lived an enchanting bird, the chief of all birds, Jummez. Jummez fell in love with an ordinary woman on an extraordinary day.”

“Let’s pretend that you, dear Grief, are Jummez.

You, Jummez, started to visit her every night, flying through her window, you would change into your human form, and spend the night in her arms before flying out the next morning, leaving the same way you came. One evening you returned with a ring in your mouth and the promise to wed your love, but the jealous neighbors got to you first, and hurled broken glass at you. Severely wounded, you found your way back to your home in the heart of Mt. Carmel and you prepared to die.

In another version of the tale, you, dear Jummez, were not simply wounded. In this other version of the story, your whole body was completely dismembered.”

What a strange word, “dismember,” which somehow aurally reminds me of “remember.” From a quick online search, it is rooted from the Latin word “dismembrare,” which itself is from the Latin roots de, meaning “take away,” and membrum, meaning “limb.”

“Birds that heard the news that Jummez had been dismembered took to lamenting. They began to pluck their feathers in grief, and they could not stop until they became featherless, as though they had retreated to their first form, nestlings, unable to fly.”

I heard that such feathers from grieving birds make the softest pillow-stuffers. They are reserved for imperialists’ ears and colonizers’ heads to rest upon as they sleep soundly. When their wives and husbands ask them about the pillows—who made them and from where—husbands and wives open their mouths to reply, but as if in a state of amnesia (or not), they cannot find the words.

“Now returning to Jummez’s love, the ordinary woman with an extraordinary gift of conjuring cures potent enough to bring back the beloved departed. One such cure is made from mixing blood from an animal of halal together with five drops of fig’s milk. She carries the medicine with her and wanders from town to city to this day, searching for Jummez and his dismembered limbs calling out, ‘I am the doctor with the cure!’”

“Wait,” Grief interrupts. “Why do you pretend that Jummez, the chief of all birds, is me?” he asks.

“To keep your attention. Now, it’s said that the eyes of Jummez’s darling, the doctor with the cure, became inflamed from her inability to stop crying, while others say it is because she is unable to cry at all. In the first version of the story, the one where her eyes are as red as fire and as tearful as the sea, she is careful not to let her eye secretions drop into the medicine bowl, because this can alter the remedy.”

“Does it affect her eyesight?” Grief asks.

“A little,” I respond, “but this doesn’t keep her from searching after Jummez and his limbs. Once, she came upon a stable to rest and saw that its retaining wall was collapsing. She immediately got to work and repaired it. Then she went inside to the underground level of the stable where horses and lions were caged and she asked them if they had seen Jummez’s limbs. Here, they directed her to one heart that was hanging above the sleeping chamber of their master, the ghoul. In gratitude, the doctor with the cure helped them as well, for she had noticed that barley had been placed to feed the lions while meat was placed in front of the horses. She switched the food around so each animal could now eat accordingly. She then made her way to the ghoul’s sleeping chamber where the ghoul was sleeping on what appeared to be the softest of pillows. The heart of Jummez hung on the wall above the ghoul’s head. The doctor with the cure carefully reached for it, clutched it but sneezed, then ran as fast as she could. The ghoul sprang from sleep and started to chase after her, calling:

‘Retaining wall, retaining wall, catch her before she gets away!’

‘For forty years I’ve been collapsing behind your house, and that woman repaired me,’ answered the wall. ‘I won’t do it! I won’t catch her for you!’

‘Horses, catch her!’ Commanded the ghoul.

‘For forty years we haven’t tasted barley until she fed us. No! We will not catch her!’

‘Lions, catch her!’

‘For forty years we haven’t tasted meat until she fed us. No, we won’t!’

The ghoul gave up and the doctor with the cure was able to get away, with one limb, the heart of Jummez clutched carefully in her hand.”

Back in my room, I am in Grief’s company, and we are having coffee just the way we two like it, bitter. I’ve completed the storytelling and neither Grief nor I can fully fathom if there was a happy ending or not.

“Why did you liken Jummez, the chief of all birds, to me?” He asks me a second time.

“Simply so I can have your attention,” was my response, just as before.

“And what happened to Jummez and his beloved? Did she collect his limbs and use the medicine to restore his life?”

“I don’t know. It’s believed that she still wanders to this day. I thought you might know her fate more than I.”

“Indeed,” Grief said, “I can be in more than one place at the same time. I hover around thousands in between the shortness of their breath, and I am embraced by families screaming, hanging on to me for the sake of their humanity. I can stand alongside your mother on the other side of the ocean. Just as I am here with you now as you accept defeat over your separation.”

“You are keeping me awake,” I say, and continue to add,

“As a child I used to believe that rain was the result of clouds holding on to our suffering until they were no longer able to. And because clouds were in constant motion, I used to tell myself: ‘This must surely be the accumulated suffering of the world collected in the clouds above my head and coming to us in a downpour.’ Would clouds have any reason to grieve or are they simply carriers of our own grief? And if they could collect the sorrow of people suffering everywhere (Gaza), where would clouds carry these tears of grief today?”

What if the downpour came right into the center of your home? You, who are reading this right now. What would you do with the rain of grief flooding your house and everyone inside it?

“Grief, I speak to you now as I have done before.” I am thinking about Jummez’s beloved, looking for his dismembered body. His scattered limbs. She can only grieve once all his torn parts are assembled. “Why don’t you go and stay with her for a while? She might appreciate your company more than I. You can be her travel companion, and you can repeat after her words as she calls out, ‘I am the doctor with the cure!’”