Archives for category: bereavement
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

This other Eden

February 15, 2012 //
0

x

In the other universe I went into reception class and helped out because they were one member of staff down. While he got through the dreaded tribunal and typically did a fantastic job although he unpicked it later and beat himself up about some of the elements.

And in the spring the fear of redundancy came nearer and we lost many hours to the worry and worked through innumerable plans and options. But we ploughed on, created contingencies and battled our way through the stress.

And we continued to be puzzled by the leak in the car and still didn’t get to the bottom of it.

And redundancy was escaped this time round but it was only a matter of time with new clouds never that far away.

And he struggled with the piano music for his birthday. We knew it was beyond him and our son but it had to be bought and they had to try. And the connection with his Mum ran through the scores and surrounded them both when they played.

And the summer was peppered with days out making way for the late holiday in Northumbria. And we cheered loudly at the experience when the voucher was redeemed. And he cheered when our son learned to swim and was so proud as he took to the blues. And in assembly only we knew the significance of the piece he’d chosen.

And he disbelieved with me that Year 6 had arrived. And he grilled the Heads in his special way as we chose the next school for our son. We settled on our first choice anyway and talked about the next phase. And we wondered how it would be when he started secondary and we watched him growing up and away.

And the in-law issues took their familiar course and Christmas was negotiated as usual.

And we teased him over the approaching big birthday and he implied, with no subtlty, that it should be like the 40th and between me and our son we did a great job.

And everything ticked along under a normal sky with all the ephemera and mundane minutia of a life lived in a real lane. And we continued to make plans like you did and we thought of the future and how it would be. And we worried about things that may never happen and normality stretched out in front of us in an endlessly comfortable comforting road, well trodden, signposted and safe.

And tonight I tried to find something to cook, glad it was half term with days off. And we needed to use the days well and had something planned for tomorrow.

And there was ordinary, there was usual, there was life, there was us, there was family, there was growth, there was time.

In this other Eden
there was all of it
nettles you could roll in

his rainless painless sky

Everything, our world

In the other universe
where he didn’t wake me in the middle of the night

x

Regained

The unrelenting sun refracts itself in pinpoints on the hard black shiny beads. Cushioned coal in the toy elephants face. The universe in his mum’s ring pulls me in deeper showing colours we can’t understand. The nap separates into spaces in the uncompromising light, microscopic chasms, losing myself in the fur. I can’t look it in the eye I can only watch the reflection calling me, but as the flashbacks trip and ambush me I drop away from here to there in the photons that hold the connection.

The shadow edges over the back of my hand, the sun warms the side of my face as our son calls up the stairs.

x

Avalanche nature’s force

Surging energy batters

New shoots underneath

x

Tags , , , ,
Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Timeless

February 10, 2012 //
0

It’s odd, there’s almost an irrelevance about this

Time

Months

Weeks

Days

Hours

Minutes

Seconds

Nano seconds

A year

What does that mean? Has anything changed? Am I further away from that moment at all? It’s just a process, it’s what we do – marking ageing. And whilst crushed under the inescapable re run there’s a part of me outside of it, of understanding I’m intrinsically woven into that moment, it’s as much a part of me now, then, and always, like my consciousness .

There’s no separation between me and then it simply is, it’s there next to me, on my shoulder, just happened and happened in another millennia. We exist in a permanence, an endless luminous being in itself, something that travels with me as I age.

As I untie towards 365 days and the wounds are hacked into, cleaved open, left gaping and gutted, screaming, searing white pain tearing out into the universe and yet underneath it all lies a deeper truth. An unknowable knowledge. No separation from then. It hurts me, it drives me, it is me.

Time is only a human construct

I am then

I am now

Approaching a year

So?

Epilogue

Tuesday

I see the telegraph poles for the first time through the mist. Turned round to go, it’s too muddy for the feelings. Double backed and from this angle it looks like a shear drop, although I know there’s trampled summer down there. It looks appetising, calling. One displaced seagull and a squelching suede grey dog. Going towards the edge as the temperature dips again, not sure what’s over there,

in an aching English mist yearning for the Colorado river.

Pidgeons still there on a lower branch etched into the morning. Still watching me, biding his time. Just a ball of black from this angle, then flaps heavily fluted as they all pass over me. I look for his Mum at the bus stop and she’s there wrapped up in brown, powdered in the scent of setting lotion. And the chug throb takes her away as the snow starts to fall. A distant hammering over feintly shined bricks.

I can’t walk much slower. But I have to meet it.

Wednesday

Ground like cardboard, frozen paw prints, iced gusts slow my progress. I don’t want to be here. Lost seagulls wander skirting the air looking for a reason. Mud dried out dry ski slope, minus something or other. Nose and eyes running. Easier to walk but bitterly I’m not here. Can’t do this.

This coldness, this love, this pain

Time for the descent

Thursday

Bottom of field, fence ripped out replaced with steel bars from nowhere. Alien, out of place, a 6 foot letter N. Things hop by me mirroring my movements. Footsteps echoing on hollow ground, waiting to see who comes by. And here are my favourites waiting for the troops. Heavy blue frayed lines going over the top. The fields fueled with beaten gold, looks like it should be warmer. A jigsawed letter from when we used to use stamps and the sky looks like June somehow.

And there’s one twig left, arms outstretched under their calling caws

Bending in the breeze

cropped to fit my view

It’s the day before tomorrow

x

Today

Raven

Your cloak over food

bird prints smashed under deep tread

Hunger waits for thaw

One legged black bird

carried on avoiding crust

Twenty three reasons

Tags , , ,
Categories Grief, Loss

Error code:

February 7, 2012 //
0

Week 51 waiting for the guilt of a day when I don’t cry. It will come, it’s inevitable but I fear it. I will have to allow it though, when it comes, let it in and let it pass just like all the other elements.

The physical process has caught up with me recently, running on empty for so long. I’m tired of the aching ribs after a bad few days. Tired of thinking and feeling, of constantly churning it around in my mind. It’s always there running in the background like some antivirus software chugging away, slowing down the system.

He would do a ‘clean up’ once a month and fiddle about with programmes that were outside of my area. I wasn’t really bothered so long as I could use email and internet. It was what he did, his designated department like doing the BBQ, poking the fire while I arranged lettuce or being in charge of the TV reception in a holiday cottage – he checked the scarts, I unpacked the clothes. Those little parts of a relationship that build up over the years, that you carve out between you, that you grieve for in the new world, losses within loss, all needing to be looked at.

I was never entirely sure why it took so long to run these scans but it was built into the odd weekend and apparently improved the system. So into the new world it occurred to me there was no ‘cleaning up’ being done mid month or at any other time and I wondered just how long the computer would work without this input. It did slow down a little but nothing that another cup of green tea couldn’t wait for. Of course whenever I switched it on it screamed at me to update, install and upgrade but I tentatively then defiantly and more recently, irritatedly clicked out of them. I could get to my blog, that was enough, it was ok. But at some point when the window reminding me of the number of updates became so huge it needed its own update, I decided to do something about it. And it rattled away through the night and a through a worrying amount of the following morning but nothing exploded or combusted and my email was still there. Solved it, for now at least. Another aspect to bitterly take over, to stumble through and take on. To just about get away with it, (like existing.)

It took me back to an early moment from before we were even married. In the long pre parenthood evenings we became obsessed with a computer game (me, for a while. Him for…a little longer). I faffed about with it, complained at some of the imagery, but occasionally enjoyed blowing something up after an irritating day at work, plus it was great for bouts of PMT. He, naturally, took it more seriously and compared notes and techniques with his friend who’d introduced the blessed thing to us in the first place.

There was competition between us and of course I couldn’t keep up. It was silly and fun and I was many levels behind him. However… one evening while he was engrossed in some programme I decided to have a bit of a catch up. I tried my best but still couldn’t get beyond the train depot, I was stuck, couldn’t jump, couldn’t go back and couldn’t find the trick to get out (like a bad day now.) I saved it, gave up and thought just for a moment I’d have a look at where he ‘was’. I clicked on his last session, had a snoop around, was none the wiser and came out of it. I did save it properly, I’m sure I did. Honestly. But something made me look again and a horrible creeping coldness came over me (a different universe of coldness to the one sledgehammered around you when you’re taken into a private office and the soft gentle click of the door closing behind you is as loud as your heart banging in your ears.)

But back then in that simple free careless griefless lossless world, it was a bad feeling. I looked again at his session and, god help me, I’d overridden it with my own, mine from the ‘early girly baby ‘ levels that he’d gayly skipped over weeks ago. This wasn’t good. Not good at all. I thought about trying again but was well out of my depth so trudged guiltily down stairs to get his attention. I stood before him like a naughty child, my expression saying it all when I thought I had bad news for him (a universe away from when I approached the same settee thirteen years later to sit by our son. Then there was no expression, there was no face, I was nothingness, I was void.)

But back then he looked up as I jokingly offered him back the engagement ring to illustrate the depths to which I had fallen. To be honest, there was some swearing and he had a fantastic range, so creative and so many new words that I’d learnt over the years. Some of them came out then, as he went to survey the damage. We were never really quite sure how I did it but clearly now there was a job to be done so I replaced the ring and let him get on with it. He was still busy getting on with it when I went to bed later and like my recently updated system apparently he also chugged away through the night …just to catch up. And so a mere seven hours later and all was as it should have been. I did finish the game at some point and we emailed his friend to explain my ‘faux pas’. I remember his email back to us, it was very very long and made only one comment repeatedly ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’.

Years later I was pretty good on the computer but he was always a step ahead and was in charge of the background stuff, that suited me and it worked for both of us. But now I have to tinker and mess about with things I don’t really understand. I have to make mistakes, and get it wrong, I have to research if I don’t know, I have to google it and if all else fails ‘get a man in’. Like I had to recently about the boiler. But I make sure I know my angles, till I know enough or have some idea of what to say. I gird my loins, know my lines and hide my ring finger in my pocket. I get through it, feel stronger until he rings back later with figures and says ‘do you want to discuss it with your husband first?’

I say I’ll get back to him and drop the phone. The remains of the day are overridden.

But now I can’t go upstairs to catch up, I can’t do anything, I can’t change it, no amount of hours will erase this incomprehensible situation. And the whole grotesque programme is turned up loud, running, screaming at me in the foreground now. And all I can see are all the details in a neon garish close up counting down brightly pixilated all around me, in a continual strange loop, inescapable rushes ticking and ticking, watching me watching it, re living it second by second, frame by frame, atom by atom for the next week

until

Game over.

x

Epilogue

Sodden after snow, remaining clumps hang on to coldness. The thick mist pulls itself close into the hill. The air is saturated with bird calls. Ugly mud demanding its way. Fuzzy horizon, battered and damaged ground beaten by snow and little ice pools of mud strawed out the old grass.

Way too many dogs having to walk despite the cold.

Damp quelled people shuffle around me as though I’m not here. Standing oddly in the middle of nowhere typing with a purpose they don’t know.

Not so cold, but the day carries an odd heavy mysteriousness. Time to work this out at home, I think. Treading down the plants I stood by earlier, bashed and held back by frozen tears. None of this feels real today. The bird tapping through the mist, the careful steps, the tingling skin. I don’t think I’m here. I don’t understand this. Time for a slow descent, this isn’t working.

Heady anticipation

On the edge

Clinging

Tested the normal route but it was impassable, clung to branches and changed direction. Tripped, snagged by bramble, ignore and keep going. Needed to pick my way home by the steamed up traffic. Thrown back into the rush hour thoughts. Hurrying relentless. Glanced at woolied toddler safely shielded from this icy pain trundled by in designer wheels. Flipped back to the days of tantrums and tired achievements of getting out just to buy a sticker book. And it hurts too much and I have to stop.

And just by my drain I met the old lady, huddled years weighing her down. Taking care of herself in wool and nylon, smiling up at me with support of stick and terrier. And is that bedraggled matted guide her only company when she closes the door? Has she been through all of this near the end of her life? What agony has she lived with? How has she changed to accommodate the weight of loss? Creased and stripped by the hours but still out there in the cold, in the winter, hunching her way through the days.

I smile back. I want to hug her, I want to hold her tightly, this total stranger wet and wrinkled in navy. I want to take it all away, what ever it is. To comfort, to make better, to carry, to ease her pain and mine. It will be ok, it will be ok, it will stop. I want to cry in her arms as the dog pulls and yaps at our feet. His jingling collar shining through the darkness.

I hold the image. What does she know? What will I know by then?

Did I walk past myself?

Her persistence. Her pain.

One step in front of the other, following the scratch click of eager paws.

Hardened, but grace in her stoic fragility.

x

Tags , ,
Categories Grief, Loss

Bleak House

January 31, 2012 //
0

Crunching over iced spaghetti to a familiar place. Little lego houses touched by sun amongst the frozen air. Fingers throbbing through a peaceful still winters morning. The town beneath me easing into the day, the constant hum, the disembodied voices bringing their usual interruption. Rustle of anoraks and scamper of hardened paws. Watching them become the mist, free and eager, oblivious to this pain. I’m jealous for a moment, I want to run with them, fast, irresponsible and untroubled. But the feeling fades with the image and I slot back into my inert emptiness.

All the old words frozen into the ground, under the sturdy table, the moments, the minutes, the transience of feeling. Out now to the heavy dense horizon. White souled, our smoked cathedral, hiding behind it all. It’s all still here, the permanence under the changes. The truth carved out in the land, the things that cannot go, that lie waiting for release, the inescapable under everything. Coated in the cold ephemera of change, of trying and persisting on top of it all, of movement and life. It’s all here, waving at me in the statued twigs bending in the wind. In the bird call squeaky door that pierces the landscape – everything is white and quiet in the noise. Shy blushed walls thawing in the warmth that doesn’t reach its neighbour and a pale gold inching steadily, lying across the ground.

A plane engine drills and spins to somewhere

I turn to ice

Waiting

The landscape cuts into me

I am here

Tomorrow its February

x

Tags
Categories Grief, Loss

Wormhole

January 26, 2012 //
0

I woke at the bottom of a deep well. It’s cold, damp and dark. I can’t be bothered to look up though I believe there’s daylight up there somewhere.

The ground is hard with sharp broken edges that stick into me, burrowing deep beneath the skin. They puncture and tear. I feel around in the grey swamped air walking my fingers through mud, comfortably soft in my nails. I squeeze my grip in, down further till the mud sneaks and pushes through my hands. I’m making a fist for no reason while my nails hurt my palms. Nothing crawls down here, not that I can see. Maybe they’re here but waiting. I don’t fear them, they can’t do me any harm, not now. I wait for sounds, soft underbelly dragging through slime but even that’s gone.

I shuffle backwards to the wall and hug my ankles. My ears are aching, I rest the side of my head on my knee and listen to the sound of my grief. Moss dripping, oozing green, taps my forehead, lost any sense of time. I’ve been down here forever, this is where I exist, where I was born. There is no passage of time although things drip onto me, appearing to shift, yet I don’t. I am static, part of this place. If I breathe long enough it may stop. Something will change. My feet are cold, my sluggishness persists. The only movement I allow is the rise and fall of my chest. Why is the air so heavy? I don’t want to move my hands through it. It’s too much effort to lift my head. With each breath I try to take up a smaller and smaller space. If I reduce my size maybe it will turn down the feelings? Willing, trying to shrink myself into the soil. I try to push myself into the bricks behind me, leaving an imprint on my back but they resist me, they won’t let me fade. I wonder how tall the structure is but still can’t look up. I imagine a pinpoint of light somewhere. It might be nearer than I know, might be bigger, but that’s irrelevant with slimy steeped walls. They’re back now, things that crawl and wrap themselves around me. Let them come to bite and slither, I won’t feel it. How many breaths will it take before the air thins, before I loosen my grip? I listen to the dankness, the steady trickle drip seep wait of space you can cut. Maybe further down is an option, what if I dig, can I tunnel underneath and out, are my hands strong enough ?

I scratch gouge into the soil. A place to nurture and sustain, but down here it waits redundant, waits for me? I force deeper, hand caked in mud. I sit up and crawl round, kneeling leaning forward, I scrabble around in the dirt. I can get my hands down further and pull up chunks of earth. It smells fusty, fresher than where I’d curled, freed worms wriggle at me. I ignore them and keep digging. It comes easier now, softer, less resistant, crumbles to my touch. It opens up, caving in to my pressure. It concedes a gap, just big enough. I’m so small now I can squeeze myself through.

And down.

Its tight and dangerous but I don’t care. The soil pushes around me, I taste it, spit out and protest, but keep going. The air smells bitter, rancid, earth and air weigh me down, hold me back, but I keep crawling. There is only blackness, mouldering at me, calling me in further. My knees hurt, my back goes into spasm but there’s no room to stretch. I feel it tighten, just one more constriction. I breathe through the pain till it passes. Feeling my way, exhausted.

Why am I even bothering, why don’t I stop to rest, let the soft earth blanket me? Teasing oblivion, playing with it. Somehow compelled to keep moving. I’ve come this far. I hate the blackness, the pressure, the panic. It moves over and through me, I can’t move backwards, I can’t stop, I can’t go on, I can’t ache anymore, I can’t wait anymore, I can’t be anymore, I can’t hurt anymore, I can’t fight anymore, I can’t give, I can’t dig, I can’t move, I can’t move, I must move, I must go, I must keep going, must get out, get out, need to dig out, can’t give up, won’t give up, don’t let me stop, don’t stop, won’t stop, push claw and fumble, then the soil is in my eyes, in my ears, I want to scream but my mouth fills with earth. I force outwards. Panic. I burst my terror out into the ground. The earth fills my mouth and nose as my limbs lurch forward. My hand grapples for air, feels air, it’s cold. Its different. I heave against it, smash stumble grasp. I breathe in the air and poke the soil from my mouth. Gagging, coughing out the traces. Before the energy leaves me I bash through the last barricade of soil and clamber and drag, withered, out and up. I pull myself free, up onto the soft ledge. And lie there for a while till my breathing settles. I ache everywhere. I’m battered and broken – but out. I blink the last of the dirt from my eyes and open them.

It’s dark

I look up

I’m in a dank deep well.

x

Categories Grief

I feel therefore I am

January 18, 2012 //
0

Studying the worn out, creaky old thing in the corner of our room, time aged and unstable. No, not myself through the looking glass but his old bookcase, held together with masking tape and love. I spent many moments grieving through his books, looking at his favourite, the heavy old one, battered dust cover with pages he poured over and consumed. His need to understand to make sense of everything, to put it in boxes then make connections, to have his own world view. There in the pages, the ideas learned, projected, assimilated, the evolved musings and the notions we discussed. Thank god he got that book read. He’d been saving it for years – a real treat, like a great bottle of wine.

At least those words were drunk, swirled around and savoured. They made him dizzy and happy for a while.

But what about all the others? The new ones neatly ordered, ready to be worked through over the next twenty years. Pillars of novels now academia was out of the way. Mind you it would never have really been out if the way, always the odd new concept to creep in, something else that needed to be looked at. Couldn’t resist it. At least he worked through the books he bought, whereas I just bought books and added them to the pile. However,the past eleven months have made me read – greedily, desperately, searching for what others did. How ? what? why? stepping stones, outreached hands, nets and sky hooks, real hooks and hope. I have to get through all my new books before I can look back at any of the others.

And now his books sit and look back at me, questioningly. The pages, the chapters, the paragraphs, the sentences, the words, the letters, the punctuation, the hours. Will I read them for him? Maybe some of them, will our son? Maybe some. They sit collecting dust, like me. I picked one off the shelf in the early days, one from the top of the pile. ‘Descent into Hell’, another bit of light reading… Oh the irony, turned out to be my journey, not his. All of them of the old world, the old order, when there were plans.

What if it had been me who didn’t get to see out her plans?

What would he have made of this? How would this have fitted into his Weltanschauung? or veltanshnitzel, as I preferred to call it. How would he have coped? To be a single parent, to carry the weight of responsibility, the full-time job of grief. How to make sense of all this? The tumbleweed existence, this relentless nowhereland? How would he have moved concrete steps through the quicksand seconds?

Everything was about understanding.

And now I do the same, but its all about feelings not thoughts. Am I creating this grief because I experience myself as being alive? Is that even a valid question?

I get close sometimes then it slips away. It’s almost as though I ‘get it’ but it’s just off to the side in my peripheral vision and if I turn to look at it, to bring it into focus, into consciousness then it disappears. It’s there, I feel it, I sense it, but it can’t be looked at head on. Bit like existential angst but the flip side, he’d know what I mean. x

Battling with it all this morning.

Back in our early days on the phone, wrestling with four-dimensional space time (as you do). Then into the mothering it became less of a focus, for me. I was too busy or tired to think about Schopenhauer’s struggle with feminism while my own view on an ’emergent property’ had more to do with both ends of our child than a theoretical feature of the universe.

He nicked a friends classic line and often tried it out on me. ‘But how do you know you exist?’ Best delivered for maximum effect and impact while he was sitting comfortably looking out of the window and I was plate spinning toddlers, trying to find an illusive shoe or fighting fabric with my head up a duvet cover… Oh how we laughed.

Now I struggle with my own mind-body problem which is centred on the realisation that its morning and wondering whether or not I can be bothered to haul my carcass out of bed?

So now it’s me who sits and stares out of the window in this empty museum of wonders. Stale ideas leaving coffee rings around my heart. A delight of knowledge that served it’s purpose, a cycle, a journey, a mind. He didn’t like intermittent faults, liked to get to the bottom of things, to solve and to fix. No, he certainly wouldn’t have liked this. The irrational, the unpredictable, the ambiguous nature of grieving. This abstract and empirical process. To grieve, to occur in the grief itself, or of the grief itself? He certainly liked to challenge himself, but this is a book he’d have left on the shelf. Good job its my story, that its me bent double, tying myself in knots, feeling the ends of the universe as I unravel and implode in my own singularity.

Now I can finally answer his question.

Yes I exist, I know because I’m in pain.

P.S

First thing

As I crunch freeze into the last month burning gloveless, isolated tweets and hurrying calls. Too cold even for grief. Should have worn the scarf. Icing sugared sparkled bridge, wanted to stay but I daren’t. At least it’s frozen the recent mud. Too hard to be slippy today. Icicles instead of tears. Must go, steadily tiptoe down the rushy glen, tentatively over decorated steps. It’s hiding in the undergrowth today, a little bit timid and shy, it rustles at me as I hurry from the cold. It’ll be back, can’t do much with it if it won’t be looked at. Round the corner past the end house where we had the BBQ in a frayed lost summer. She talked without censorship and he assessed the potential, while our son entertained himself on the pointless slope. The wall blew over in the recent gales. I helped the owner throw bricks on the garden, clearing a path through the tired rubble, the bricks make my hands sore and scuff my fingers as I hurl them. They bash down hard on hopeful plants that were waiting at the edge.

Managing destruction… yeah, ain’t we all?

Nearly home, take the path by the drain cover, somewhere low and dark, it’s carried regardless, I hear it muttering, un-stemed, busily plotting and churning beneath us.

I glance at the crumpled cider can, finishing off their fussy border, their marked out territory, christened with Strongbow. I leave before the sun gets round to me.

x

Tags , ,
Categories Grief, Loss

Closer

January 11, 2012 //
0

I was almost exactly 3 years younger than him.  He could never quite remember how old I was and settled on 29, the age when I met him. I was quite happy with that especially while I crept into my thirties.

In more recent years he accepted I wasn’t 29 anymore and we teased each other about being middle aged. Though he was technically born middle aged, and secretly liked it, I was finally starting to join him.

He was almost exactly 30 years younger than his mum.  She went and he began advancing on her. He noted it. He contemplated catching her up and marked time with projected milestones for our son. But he didn’t have that long to wait and now his grief and anguished words rattle round the empty house.

Somewhere back in my early void I remember a half thought that we would stop being three years apart. Today I inched towards him.

I like finding new grey hairs, though I insist they are silver and imagine if I keep living that I’ll eventually become some long silver haired storyteller, sitting by a camp fire,  weaving  tales of loss and love into the starry night. Casting out my net of words to bring them close through the darkness, to teach and pass down the wisdom of the ages.  Smiling warmly and sparkling at them with the compassion and knowledge glow of a wounded healer.  However, I’ve got this far without ever sitting round a camp fire due to a deep aversion to canvas. It’s not on my radar, unless it’s to be primed and painted upon. So if I intend to evolve into a wild woman of nature I will need to take baby steps with that too, the first being to even allow myself to venture into Millets. Another long road.  

In the meantime I think Grey is Good, (to mis-quote, er… Wail Street). I think I’m getting old. I don’t think I’m 47 now, I think I’ll soon be 50, I’m not that young anymore, it won’t be that long. But then that’s not a helpful thought with a son to raise. I have no intention of colouring my hair, though I had many such ideas in the early aftermath including cutting and hacking it all off aggressively with the kitchen scissors. I wanted to wear a stark change like a badge of pain or a sorrow sandwich board, like the Red Indian widows who shave their heads. People would shun me and whisper in aisles (they still do, of course) and it would remind them of my agony. But I neither cut nor coloured and monitor the passage of time, for now, through its length and added silver.

So I’m catching up with him, for the first time not three years between us. I still move while he waits.

And what will happen when I get to 48? Will I just stop too?  Or will I get to feel what its like to be 50? Will I experience it for him? and will I be older than him? Will I try on the old age he frequently worried about? I’m gaining on him. I’m not the 29 year old with all the plans and dreams. I’m certainly not the 46 year old he knew last February. These 330 days, these 7,920 hours, these 475,200 minutes have eradicated all but an echo of who I was. This older woman who lives with a pain he never knew, who ages because there’s no choice and who sits mesmerized  by the flashing cursor on the screen, counting down the seconds of her life.

The distance between us, hour upon hour

becoming less

until

at last, to nothing 

 

P.S

This morning

Sat one bench down waiting for some light. Slipped cautiously, carefully through the winters mud, incongruously tethered to my birthday gift bag. Shining out, pale egg shell, pure and crisp, banging against the side of my battered parka. Grass trying to find a way up through the trampled persistence of sludge. I sit and watch and listen. After my moments I lift the underside of the bag from the dewy cold bench. It remains un tainted by the grubbiness. A splash squash of moisture leaving an imprint on its matt smoothness and a pattern on the bench to show that it was here.

The sun doesn’t quite know what to do today but the air insists on coldness.

Under the buzz of the council drilling in new street lights I focus on the chorus, still just winning over urban necessity.  There was some peace in my morning, I look out of myself at the painted image of the cathedral, neatly drawn out in the haze. But now behind me someone’s blasting with a chain saw, bright hard hat and goggles, some purposeful destruction.  I think it’s time to go and thaw out my hands, switch the computer on and wait…..

Categories Grief, Loss

Severe weather warning

January 3, 2012 //
0

2012, apparently. New term and the unravelling towards our first year.

Having traversed the last two weeks of someone elses life, scarred with moments of petrified reality, I slipped into this mornings darkness with a distorted relief.

Our son wanted to leave early so we blew past the exasperation of  wet cars as they queued to get anywhere, him – huddled and hooded, me  – panniered with p.e kits. The howling started as soon as I left him but this time it was the environment, not me.

Perfectly screaming trees, a deliberately slow walk back through the grey. Sprinkled orange around familiar buildings,  shiny rooves. Calling, baying branches, soaked hair  and startled birds.  The enfolding gloom, squeaky car tyres search for grip as I creep towards the bridge. Dancing ivy responding to tortured gales, brushing tyres on tarmac sweeping surface water, headlights with a purpose. Smashing up puddles as they make some progress. Little circles of colour on my screen as I type. But can I cross the bridge?

Another day

Torment

Changing gear, bus rattles underneath to its function. Steaming people going somewhere. Sardined strangers.

Am I going across?

I study the options. Slimy path back to school, had to leave him there sheltering in the morning storm. Or the uneven path to the horses where he bounced and skimmed off his bike in the winter terrain and I hurried  to him with my rucksack full of concern. Last January before the clocks stopped.  

I need to go. Can’t watch the traffic any longer. Time to go, stepping out. Keep moving, empty road as I cross. I see down to the junction with an approaching lorry furtively sneaking out of grey. A torn discarded piece of poster on the floor  ‘8 – 12.30 -12th Jan’ ? Wonder what plans have been made, for who? stuck up for all to see, then battered away by the weather. Will anyone turn up?

Blackbirds protesting, instinctive, animal, pure, driven. Waiting for this moment. Another normal day.  I make it to the other side, so soggy and trampled underfoot. So familiar now, so comforting.  I stand for a moment to survey,

it’s all still here, the landscape, the rhythms, the grief.

Squelching and slippy, need wellies really. Which is the best way? To pick a path through it carefully, steadily.  Hair in eyes.  Huddled walkers hurry away, it’s not a day for standing. But I’m oblivious to it all again. The sky hangs lower and darker than the hour, in some odd pre dawn. A light goes out somewhere, must be morning I guess. It’s all still here, shiny wet picnic bench but I don’t need to stay.

Crows laughing at me, what do they know? Wet skin, mist lifting, footsteps somewhere behind me. Fluorescent walker with an anoraked terrier, blazoned lime, russet and muddy white. I observe and appreciate their flash of bright intention.

They drag me back, showered hair in the gusting downpour, going round in circles. Time to navigate the steps I suppose.  All as expected,  round we go again.

Where next?

Can’t see the screen for raindrops.

Gales whipping up,

telling me to go.

Familiar, cocooned in isolation.

x

Out of the gloom came walking greyness who turned into a wet hug at the right time.  She was always there at the right time, from day one. She brushed the hair away and talked of windswept children and morning chaos  helping anchor me to my current life and wondered if I’d braved the hill. When the rain started to sting I dripped back home. It turned to stabs of hail for a moment and then inside  to muffled doubled glazed battering at the glass.

 I sit in my damp coat and wait for last week to catch up with me.

He’d left the fairy lights on.  Loud ticking quiet clock, marking seconds that don’t exist.

x

Categories Grief, Loss

Cause and effect

December 31, 2011 //
0

 

How did I breathe afterwards?

How did I organise and shake hands?

How did I close the door when they left?

How did I take him to school?

How did I see faces from the old world?

How did I put on an expression?

How did I stumble to their arms?

How did I get off the floor?

How did I get through the firsts?

How did I talk to our son?

How did a counsellor sit on our settee?

How did I sleep?

How did I get out of bed?

How did I crawl for food?

How did I find a community?

How did I change routines?

How did I keep appointments?

How did I take on his jobs?

How did I stand waiting?

How did I sit by an empty chair?

How did I walk through our town?

How did I make decisions?

How did I pack?

How did I travel?

How did I look over the balcony?

How did I stand at the top of the mountain?

How did I return?

How did I get through the memories?

How did I get through the responsibilities?

How did I continue with commitments?

How did I sit at the swimming gala?

How did I listen to him playing to the crowd?

How did I find my voice at parent’s evening?

How did I watch the Nativity?

How did I wrap presents?

How did I make a new Christmas?

x

How do I support him?

How do I sustain?

How do I continue?

How do I exist?

How do I live?

How do I age?

How do I pass through time?

How do I hold on?

How do I let go?

x

How do I do it all again?

How do I look to the light?

x

How do I breathe?

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Surrounded

December 24, 2011 //
0

The granite sphere is back unexpectedly. The concrete blackness of shock has encased me, it’s the day before Christmas Eve.

The badness has been around for a while, hounding me, plaguing me, hiding in my shadow. It would pop up to say hello when I didn’t know it was there. It played games with me, darting behind trees, laughing, teasing, just to ambush me as I walked by.

But it’s not hiding now, it’s out, it’s here, in non glorious mono colour, in my room, in my body. It’s on every breath and the enormity of what I’ve persisted in calling ‘the weekend’ has hit like a tsunami.

In it’s wake I lie crushed and terryifyed. The weight of reality seems to make the air itself heavy and painful.

At this moment I can’t understand how I’ll get through the day let alone the weekend. And somewhere behind it all I can hear the echoes of my widowed friends screaming at me ‘baby steps’.

Yesterday through my drunken wrapping up session I’d begun to regret my plans for a cut off Christmas, seeing no one, not even parents.

I missed her, who I used to be, fussing about, buying too much, wrapping with too much precision, worried I hadn’t got enough bows, and most importantly, loving their faces when they opened whatever the package containined. I always felt satisfied if I’d reduced someone (usually my Mum) to tears with a gift. A job well done.

But this year I don’t need gifts to make them cry. They cry because they can’t fix it, and I cry because I can’t show them my pain.

So in addition to the fundamental grief there is yet another loss, of her, of us, of our traditions, of our togetherness, of our Christmases.

Our mess of grief all tangled up and confused, knotted darkness, strung up with no purpose.

Layers upon layers of grief. Un wrapping it all slowly but never getting to a gift. Unless the grief itself is the gift? A permanent presence, an anchor to love, a pain that etches itself into you, weaves through and around until it’s part of you at your very heart. An enfolding force, a guide, a teacher.

And the memories dance and twirl around you in never ending spirals, fractals of our identity, a graceful frond to forever, patterns of spirit surround us.

Images of my childhood, her Christmases and the groundwork in place for who I’d become, and our Christmases, new and negotiated, with visits, plans and dreams, and our sons Christmases , stockings and Santa and me eating carrots, biting chunks out of apples and leaving floury footprints on the patio. At five in the morning when binbags rustled louder than when I packed them and the coldness tingled with anticipation.

And now

And a new artificial tree for my artificial life and the unravelling of the innocence. We will always watch the Polar Express last thing on Christmas Eve. I bought it for our son when he was train obsessed and always wept over it’s beauty, it’s symbolism of rites of passage, of growing up, of magic, of love.

He would raise an eyebrow over my sentimentality but he adored the spirit too and I know that from the things he said, from the stories we shared and from his reaction to the tiny plaster of paris Santa we found when looking through his mum’s possessions.

And I know where the Santa is now, and I know what it all means.

And we will create new traditions.

But at the weekend they’ll all be there around me whether or not they are seen.

The little girl I used to be,

The wife and mother who I became,

and the woman I’m becoming

Just me and our son, yet surrounded by all my family. The relatives now and then, those I knew as a child for just a few years, those who are still here for me now, who helped to form me, who support me by trusting me to find my own way and the spirit and love of those who hold me close even when they can’t.

And us, in everything, in every fleck of glitter and every tiny light, ineffable, constant, unknowable yet certain.

And at the centre of it all, our son, my beacon, my promise, still a child – but shifting, enjoying feeling older, easing himself into the next phase, often just one beat ahead but I still keep up. Always behind him, always around him. Responding, guiding, trusting.

Finding his way through the grief, through the pain. Held in the love that defines us.

Holding his hand as we creep through our morning to carefully unwrap what we’ve been given, to understand the gift and use it. Through the overwhelming darkness to find what is waiting. In the light of the dawn all existence fades to a being with my soul. Eventually all things merge into One, and our love runs through it.

To hold tight, to hold on to each other. To find what we need, to become who we need to be.

This moment

This pain

This joy

This agony

This love

The bell still rings

Believe

X

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »