A Piece of History: Ravages of Grief

      Grief.
 
      Grief is an odd thing, isn’t it? One single emotion has such a vast number of affects on people. They can react in any number of ways, undergo vast changes, or linger in a stage of grief for years on end. Grief is one of those inevitable rites of passage that no one looks forward to. It can render permanent shifts in perspective, and often does. Time becomes entirely subjective, with hours flying by like seconds, or creeping along with the patience of aeons. Time heals all wounds, doesn it?
 
       Or does it merely allow festering?
 
       Grief… It is not entirely a human emotion, as animals have been seen in the act of grieving. However, the animal mind accepts life as life, death as death, and does not seek to reverse the cycle of things. The human mind seeks to know "Why?" The complexities of human thought, as far as we know, make death something senseless in most cases. (Perhaps animals are the far wiser in simply taking a truth of existance as it comes.) Death is something to be feared and avoided, often misunderstood, rarely welcomed.
 
       This had never been the case for Jonas Foster, death mage and hit for hire. Death had been simply a part of life, a turning of the Wheel…until Diamanta Rothwell. Suddenly, new insight, new understanding: Death was an enemy. Death stole love, Death destroyed dreams. Death, the shrouded Reaper, chilled the heart and left budding compassion to fade in the absence of happiness. It was this chill, this icy detachment that Jonas had known for so long. His entire life, if indeed it could be called that, had been that of an observer, never a participant. The first active participation he’d engaged in had been brutally cut short, and the death mage was left to wither in the encroaching cold.
 
       It had, perhaps, been too long since he’d calmly watched events unfold around him. Maybe the warmth Dia had imparted to him, taught him to feel had become too intricately wound with his own mind. Whatever the reason, Jonas found himself desperately longing for that warmth once more. It haunted him when he woke up in the morning, tantalized his mind when he sat with a cup of bitter coffee and looked out at the sunlight. He was never warm, even fully clothed in a heated room. It had never bothered him before, the chill of mortality which clung to his very skin. Having felt the comfortable warmth which comes so easily to those who live their lives, the death mage was left to wonder if he would ever feel warm again. It bothered him, even more so than his active hunt to thwart Death, that he realized the difference. Indeed, that he wanted that warmth back.

     
      Having never before experienced grief, Jonas Foster had no idea how to comfort himself. Cigarettes and alcohol offered no respite from the icy fingers clutching his heart. They’d been part of his existance for years, what could they give now they hadn’t before? He had no one to turn to. Habit of long-standing kept his very few acquaintances at arm’s length, despite the compassion always showing in Spider’s eyes when he wandered into her bookstore for another text on daemonic summonings. Intelligent in so many ways, Jonas was utterly at a loss how to deal with this new, wholly unknown emotion. The pain had become almost commonplace now. Months had passed since that bloody June morning, and with each day, the hurt burrowed a little deeper into his bones. He had long prided himself on his ability to deal with and ignore pain, but this ache of the heart was something he couldn’t tough out. It hurt and there was no balm in Gilead to offer respite.

      How do ordinary people, for Jonas could not be called ordinary in any fashion, deal with the pain? How does Everyman learn to live again after such heart-rending agony? Jonas sought the answer to that question almost as fervrently as he did the summonings. What he found puzzled him. People coped with Death by celebrating life. They loved, laughed, ate, danced and drank. The death mage read more and more of how many children were born nine months after funerals, how wine and song had been part of a wake for centuries.

      All well and good, but how does one celebrate life when one has done nothing but learn of Death? This was the question which tormented Jonas’s mind. The summonings were simple, in a peculiar way. They asked only that he learn, that he study and struggle to attain the level of knowledge to use them properly. They did not ask him to go out into sunlight and smile. He found such a thing impossible now, sliding into the coldness of his previous existance as he was. Was it because Death had taken the one thing which had brought him the warmth of life? Jonas looked blankly at the world as it passed him by, and found himself watching lovers with a sharp hunger in his eyes. They were experiencing the joy that had been taken from him. They were warm, even in the coldest December wind. They didn’t sit for hours alone and smoke with trembling hands, feeling the throat-closing pressure of tears building with no hope for release. They didn’t wake in the night on the edge of screaming, their arms reaching for someone long gone.

      To recover from grief, from Death, one must reclaim life. Jonas Foster recognized this, understood it on some basic level, but was left to wonder exactly how he was supposed to do that. When you can’t climb out of the pit yourself, who do you ask to draw you out of it?