Jenga and Grief

Published May 4, 2020 1 AM



When I was eleven years old, I realized that I was a terrible Jenga player. It was as if the wooden tower had a mind of its own; I could only ever get it to begrudgingly cough up a block or two before it collapsed.

“Don’t be so afraid!” My cousin brother would giggle at my caution whenever I struggled to remove the first block of the game. “Every tower is a little different, even if it’s made with the same blocks. Even so, it’s not gonna come falling if you take a single block out.”

Despite his advice, I always lost.

When I was eleven years old, my classmate told me how his dad had died. It slipped in with friendly conversation during the early lunch buzz, dropped so casually he might as well have told me his father had gone on a business trip. The bluntness with which he spoke almost convinced me that he was lying, an act so common among the boyish, third grade fibbers in my class.

“He died smoking on the toilet,” he smiled, a smile accustomed to laughs aimed at his long deceased father, though I wasn’t entirely sure if he was waiting for me to mock the silliness of his father’s death or recoil at its absurdity. I did neither, but stared at him blankly.

“You’re lying,” I said, a statement rather than a question. Where were the tears? The eyes skidding around? The sorrowful infliction in his voice? “Aren’t you sad?” I asked him.

He opened his mouth to speak, but promptly stopped himself upon realizing the pity in my eyes.

“Yeah, but not so much anymore.”

When I was eleven years old, I learned that people work very much like the Jenga tower we kept perpetually stacked on the coffee table. Whatever mysterious force that kept the tower from falling worked similarly in us humans; the loss of a block shook the tower a bit, held everyone in a state of anxious anticipation, but then the atmosphere stabilized along with the tower.

Over the years, my Jenga skills have far since grown, and so has my understanding of grief. This timeless, universal, incredibly human emotion holds a place in all of our lives. Thought it has the slight aftertaste of Hell and has edges like sharpened razor blades, we find a way to live with it.

For every unstable Jenga tower, there’s at least one pair of hands ready to steady it again, even if the tower is left standing on a single block.



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