"grief"

Sunday I spent about an hour in a cemetery. Cemeteries are really sobering places. Something perhaps I don't really have a grasp on is grief. Never REALLY having needed to grieve over something major in my life, I never really have experienced it... So, that said I've used that to consider the amount of compassion that i have as well...
Regardless, lets get onto the time at the cemetery. It was presented as an adventure in DC before i left to come home, well, it was more than i could have imagined it to be... I didn't really know what i was getting into, i mean i love cemeteries, i love the solemness and stillness, its a place to remember we are simply dust one moment closer to our eternal destination.
There's a depressing story to this statue involving affairs, suicide, and meditation... you can do a google search to discover more about the statue but here's my a bit sized piece of experience...
i kinda felt like henry nowen, in the time of his writing the return of the prodigal son (not to the extent of him) but nowen interacted with the painting, and for a moment i felt myself interacating with the statue. trying to feel the pain, the abandonment and the lonliness... feeling for the heavy breathing and the sighs, the raught contentment in the midst of all these negative emotions. . .

It's a place that i want to be, not so much focusing on the moments that tear down, but more on the times that are useful for building up. not that i think i understand a bit of what grief is, or that this is what it is... but really, for a second, i felt a compassion that i hadn't in a while, it was almsot like a realization that when people are in thier deepest despair, they don't need someone to rattle off this and that, but just to be there with them... simply to listen.