A sentimental journey
It’s that time of the year again. A time for making a sentimental journey. Back to the side of a loved one gone. In the hope of finding closure or appeasing guilt, or fulfilling a promise.
The journey is a sentimental one – because it is prompted by a feeling. A feeling that would not let go. Because no matter how much one claims to want it to end, in truth one unconsciously holds on to it.
And so year after year, even many times in a year, one makes the journey. No matter how time-constrained or difficult the circumstances. Curiously, the harder it is to make the journey, the more fulfilling it is to the homecomer.
It is a homecoming of sorts. For one is coming home to the other, with whom one once belonged or still does. It doesn’t matter if one returns to the side of someone who’s no longer there. One simply takes some comfort being around the now empty shell of someone who used to be there.
This sentimental journey is a routine that one never tires of doing, again and again. No matter how tired or worn out his body may come to be. For it has now transcended from being physical – it is a personal tradition that has become spiritual.
The tomb or grave has become a kind of portal for the spirits – of the living and the dead – to commune. So long as the one left behind does not stop remembering, the flame of affection between them is never extinguished, although it has taken on another color. And it takes on a higher level of warmth; yet it never burns, it only comforts more.
One may make the sentimental journey out of a conscious desire to fulfill a promise or to make amends for a broken vow. Or it may be out of an unconscious yearning to define one’s being. Between two people in love, one alone is meaningless; one needs the other to be whole.
The flowers offered, the candles lighted, the prayers whispered. While these may not be necessary, one still does them, still goes through the motions to further prove oneself to the departed beloved. No, these are not necessary, because now they are no longer saddled by physical limitations; the passing of one liberates the communication line involving both.
But, also, one may not have been tied to taking this repetitious sentimental journey out of having found meaning in the act. Going through the motions may be itself one’s search for meaning. One may be hoping that someday, while making this sentimental journey once more, one may stumble upon something – a thought, a vision or a clearer feeling – to make one grasp the meaning of it all.
In the end, real love is not possession. And a loved one never dies, for a departed beloved lives on in the heart of the one left behind. Taking the sentimental journey to the beloved’s grave is simply a thin physical sign of that.