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

Lighting The Way

December 21, 2011 //
0

Boxing Day last year and we had a stupid ‘disagreement’. I flounced off, pony tail swishing to stomp and sniff in the bedroom whilst he relocated his trusty cave to the bathroom for a two hour sulk. But our plans got in the way so instead of us both simmering quietly until a resolution, we had to haul ourselves out to a jolly family social event. Eye contact and normal service had resumed by the time we’d done Twister and ate cheesy things. But my memory of that time is not about the silly arguments that I miss as much as the joy, it’s about the large tissue papered lantern in the shape of Sponge Bob that grinned inanely at us from the conservatory.

The Christmas lantern parade was a local tradition, a beautiful heralding in of the Christmas market, the ice rink, the lights switching on and that lovely warm feeling of love and togetherness. We were impressed with the Bikini-Bottomed wonder and promised we’d join them next year for the lantern workshops and the procession itself.

At some point in November my friend reminded me of the workshops and was I still interested? I said I’d check in with our son and though part of me wanted to hibernate indefinitely and absolutely not go near anything remotely sparkly, I knew if he was up for it then we would ‘join in’ and I would wear extra armour.

And so it came to pass that by the time of the workshops he had planned to make a Borg space ship from their beloved Star Trek series. I appreciated the blackness of the symbolism. Borg are the ultimate alien, all things in their path will be assimilated and even ‘Death is irrelevant’ …ah, if only. I loved the fact that he was making a dark cube with very little that would light up amongst the twinkly illuminating glowing stars around us. The helper on the workshop was concerned he was using too much black tissue paper and the light wouldn’t show through. Without breaking down and sobbing I assured her, it was ok, and it was important that it was a faithful (to us) replica of doom.

Somewhere during the process I decided to make my own lantern and there was only one thing that it could be. My Tao symbol would be perfect. Our son found it funny that mine would be ‘all about love’ whist his was all about destruction and through the torture I saw the beauty of what we were embarking upon. I was increasingly concerned that it would be upsetting for him to hold up something that represented Daddy but through gentle questioning I found he didn’t appear to see what I did.

Mine was all about the Rite itself, down to working with the willow to gradually bend it to shape, and the forming and smoothing to build it into what it needed to be, and the papering over the cracks and damage, which were, in the end, irrelevant as the light would still shine through despite its imperfections.

I was fearful of how or if I’d get through the procession itself. How could I stand there and watch this symbol of my life be lit up? I couldn’t imagine….but I knew it would happen somehow.

The evening dawned and the car was full of excited children and a large ‘Hello Kitty’ head courtesy of our friends who had gone for a pink and white look rather than last years yellow. I cradled my lantern on my lap and returned to my trance like February service state of mind.

We started from the top of town, the Great Hall a heaving mass of anticipation and one upmanship. The lanterns and their creators paraded around each other like size zeros on the catwalk and objectively some, actually, many were amazing and elaborate but my relatively small and delicate Tao symbol was my only focus and I stood solemnly holding it aloft with a painful pride.

I encouraged my friend to stand near the door as even in the old world I wasn’t over keen on crowds, and with my fragility at an all time high, feeling highly strung and wanting to bolt, I prefered to be at the front of the throng. Plus in my head and heart the whole thing was for us anyway, for a celebration, a marking , a journey and me and my agony deserved to be in the vanguard.

We were ushered out to the waiting darkness and streamed into sections for the candles to be lit. By chance I was directed to the one that was flanked by the TV crew and though I would never see the footage, my sparkly tearyness at the moment of lighting was captured somewhere in time.

I had survived the start, put on a public face and now stood with our son and the Borg ready to weave our way to the Cathedral.

And through the winters air the wrapped up band played carols and the streets were lined on either side with children on shoulders, character spotting and ooing and ahhing, and we followed a crack squad of lantern makers who had pieced together a wide selection of Star Wars inhabitants. So I followed the tissued papered Yoda, quite fittingly with my Eastern promise to ‘feel the force around’ me and the crowd cheered, whooped and clapped and were amazed at our creations. Although I knew they weren’t clapping us specifically or probably had not even noticed us but our pain shone out over and above it all, and in my heart our lights were the brightest. And my wet eyes were not for the warmth of the spectacle or exciting Christmas spirit but for the landmarks of our life that I ticked off as I strode proudly but weakly past the statue near his workplace and abandonedly unravelled the memories as I made my pilgrimage with dignity to the bottom of town.

At the Cathedral all lanterns were parked against the railings for the waiting paparazzi to shove and consume. I held it together though inside the wailing was building. I felt numb, relieved, respectful, broken, exhausted, defeated and done. All I needed was a moment to gather myself and I’d be more than ready to pile back in the car, to crumble home and sob while he watched Star Trek downstairs.

But it wasn’t going to be, as the children wanted to see the fireworks. So just to ignite a little more pain we waited for the crowd to thin with a quick moment or two in the cathedral where my friend talked about buying the tour as a present for her husband and I spun and swooned on the inside remembering millenium Eve and the messages we wrote for our unborn baby. That Eve at the cathedral with the messages for the tree and the chimes we didn’t hear but we knew. And I could hardly look the building in the windows for the anguish it unleashed in me. so I just added it to the pile for later. Our son was enjoying himself and I was paying tribute to our life.

We edged round to the market where I looked down as much as possible. I didn’t want to see the ice rink with him drinking coffee or the twinkly German chalets replete with stuff I wanted but didn’t need and had so loved last year. It couldn’t be me who was here last year trying to decide on the wrought iron robin or cockerel. It was someone else’s life, but if it wasn’t real while did the panic grasp and bind itself round my throat again?

My window of strength had long since closed and I was close to stopping the pretence but if I let the mask fall I feared I would spiral out of control completely and that wouldn’t be a good end to the evening, it would have distressed our son and perplexed passers by (not that they mattered at all). It was a familiar management exercise but this one took every ounce of my last reserves. Every moment came with a ribbon and bow, all brightly coloured and garish, screaming out to me ‘here is your life, look closely at it, remember it well, because it won’t happen again’ and every exploding firework shattered through me and we were way too close so it hurt to listen. Whilst all around me winced and shielded themselves with mittened ears, I stood there bare hands with knuckles clenched feeling the pain of every flare as it drilled itself into me. And every flash reminding me of the years our son struggled with the loud bangs. Now he looks upwards without a flinch as I pray for the panic to subside whilst wishing I could be shot away on one of the rockets to burst and splinter into the sky, to shed my colours over the earth and leave the crowd gasping. So I let the wretched fantasy play out till the acrid smoke descends all around us and for a second I let go of the tension in my hands.

We began the return trip through the disapating throngs, everyone tired and drifting with that ‘after the concert’ sort of listlessness. but for me it wasn’t over. I still had the final part to walk in silence without the crowds to revisit, to hurt and to thank.

All those around me, including our friends, carried the lanterns under arm or over shoulder, their job done for another year. But mine was not about Christmas, it was about a life and a love. While our son swung his Borg cube to terrorize ‘Kitty’ I persisted in holding up both my head and the lantern and quietly noticed our moments as I passed by them. Held high past the pillars where we walked with me in my grey stilettos, Millennium meal on that magical night. And the call to his mum but we couldn’t say what we wanted to, by the same shop for my last birthday where we stood but we didn’t know what was approaching. And Waterstones as usual, with our son’s new book, still making my arm ache as I looked up to the glowing light. And every other walk and second till the final piercing past the statue at his workplace with all the times we met him, tired and stressed, walking ahead, heels clicking to the car park after some story spinning in his big black chair. A glance left and was torn hollow by the darkness till the final shot at the jewellers where we chose my wedding day locket.

And through all the twinkly comforting warmth, the glistening merriment, the joy of happy fizzing people, the beautiful glimmering of days without pain – walks my newly shaped family. My new world. The crisp, aching, undecorated reality of a torn existence, gutted, gouged and discarded amongst the other world of Christmas Loveliness. A beautiful middle class Hampshire way, coupled up, linked arms, rosy cheeks and wooly hats…. and us

never closer to death.

I lowered my lantern as we got to car park and the children chattered on my reflective journey home. Past A & E in silence and my friend hoping it had been ‘ok’ for us. Thank god I’d left the lights on as we bundled back through the door to carefully place the lanterns before I took my pounding grief upstairs as our son boldly went on his usual way.

Our assimilated anguish

My wounded soundless solemn walk

A broken pilgrimage

Our lanterns lit for love

My walk through the hours

My endless tears

Our cradled pain

And the blown out candle of our life

xx

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting, Uncategorized

The Uncarved Block

December 8, 2011 //
5

Someone has moved my Grieving Bench.

Its been replaced by a large picnic table – probably courtesy of the Parish Council (bless ’em). I’m not sure I like it, I glanced at it disdainfully today and kept walking. I will try it out later in the week but may move my place to the next bench down the hill. This new interruption creates a different feel, less enfolded, more outward looking. it’s not about contemplation, it’s about spreading out, so it may not be such a good fit. I liked my old battered bench for my old battered life.

I have a good view from up here and have carved it into my morning routine. sometimes this walk and the space are the process itself, sat overlooking our town with a perspective I can’t get from my cold settee in a dark dank lounge. But sometimes its only a moment, a pausing, then home to a private pain and welcomed isolation. I go with it, either way its good and necessary.

Last week while crawling through the early morning ritual of breakfast- lunchbox-bookbag-are your shoes on yet- have you got tissues routine? I acknowledged just how dark it was outside and revelled in the fact I’d be out in its blustery misery soon. I am a winter baby, I appreciate the stripping back to nothingness, i feel calm amongst bare branches. The season reflects the starkness of my life. I am a grey stormy day.

I observe, I sit above and outside of it all, it passes around me.

We swirled and buffeted our way to school and when he blew across the playground with the debris of autumn I turned to unfurl my emotions on the hill. I shuffle-huddled defiantly across the bridge till a gust of wind carried me, disheveled and bleak to my usual location. I dropped down into the morning like a Bergman version of Mary Poppins, humming ‘a bottle of Merlot makes the grief go down….’

and from my black vista I surveyed the scene.

Stormy, three layers of grey clouds over noisily protesting trees. I can see the painted horizon, solid heavy gun metal, it needs more white in it. The thick heavy wash of grey moving in from the right, fast clouds today, starkness with a purpose. Startled by floppy damp dogs who trundle after their quilted owners, both carefree and abandoned in the bluster.

A buzz of traffic tries to compete with the wilderness but I am focussed. I’m back in Howarth with both of them, cold Christmases and the obligatory protesting at yet another visit. Linked arms on the slippy cobbles and her slow unsteady gait through the graveyard to the oppressively brooding church, before we’re pulled back to reality round the corner for tourist teashops. It’s always autumn there, even in summer. The hills make her knees ache and we have to get back for the in-laws ordeal meal in the evening. Getting lost was inevitable yet fun and we never did get to the treacle mines.

What can I see in the distance now? Can’t quite make it out? Flat and white could be a frosty field and in the brown suburban-ness a late street lamp hangs onto orange. One tiny pinpoint of warmth in this appealing desolation. The rain clouds bring mist over the fields and I’m back in my long black velvet dress, the hem tatty and unravelling, wet and muddy round my bare feet as I stumble desperately across the barrenness.

Same bench – different day

and the landscape both inside and out paints an alternative story…

In the beginning was the word and the word was Nothing.

I took breath in and breathed out, that was all.

The panic and fear came from thinking, thinking ahead and dazzled by the void in front of me.

We liked the wisdom of the East – no, not Great Yarmouth, slightly further- China. He especially tried his best to be true to its nature. But as we understood from Yoda “Do, there is no try” There was something Good about it, in the truest sense of the word, least resistance was The Way. Years ago when first introduced to the concept I didn’t think ‘The Way’ would play this role in my life. I joined that particular social group because it had to be right for me, it was yet another sign. I had to follow – though ‘Widowed and Young’ was not the spiritual path of my choosing.

Some days in, those ahead of me advised ‘baby steps’. Despite the catastrophic debris of my mind I still remember my reaction. Is that all I have to do? Can I really stop trying to do and think and just creep teeny tiny little fragments of movement along? It was such a relief and release to just let go. But to simply ‘be’ turned out to be harder than it sounded and it took a while to adjust, to leave behind the practised engrained approach of many years of being busy, keeping the plates spinning and sniffing around for the next idea.

I had stopped.

Imperceptibly I slipped into this new pattern. It is my salvation.

I have learned. When the blackness arrives around me I can only surrender and regardless of whatever action I feel compelled towards, I know enough to sit it out.

It will pass.

When I stare out of myself, the carcass of who he knew, I know it’s not permanent. When the wailing makes my ribs ache and the panic crawls and ravages me from within, I breathe. I hurt – but I still breathe and after a while it shifts. And this is how it is.

There is wisdom in this process. I am learning to observe, to sit outside of as well as be the pain. Non attachment does not come easily, there is something dynamic going on.

And so I look back to the East, and am guided by a deeper truth. I am reinventing myself from the feet up and from my uncarved block comes a continued existence. I can’t say it’s a life yet, but it is an existence. Leave the block untouched, let it be, follow its natural lines.

I spend a lot of the mornings on the hill, the changeable weather and scenery reflect my grief. I am reassured by the barrenness that has replaced my earlier companions. The colours around my summer bench have decayed. I study the ground, the splinters of broken glass from the late night giddiness of youth and grubby discarded stubs.

The detritus of a life: but in the quiet of the freshly opened day the dew sits in perfect spheres on the tiny sharp blades of grass. In the sunlight each fires a rainbow at me and somewhere deep inside on some quantum level the particles push and shove for speed and position. In the surface tension on each dewdrop I am perched in a miniature reflection of myself, peering both inside and out.

Being and becoming. Uncertain duality.

In the wavelengths of light in between everything.

All in motion, giving and taking, beginning and ending, hurting and healing. Spinning atoms in tiny spheres on a whirling lump of molten rock in a swirling expanding universe.

In these moments of clarity I see it all. Simultaneously.

The wood is warm to the touch from the sun rays that connect us. The third generation star made from bits of the start of the universe heats up the carved bark that I sit on.

I feel it’s warmth, it is Good.

Everything has its place

Everything is wonderful

Even my agony.

x

I remember writing that and the wholeness I experienced. But today, right now – my legs are cold. I’ve sat here too long. Wet, hollow, alone, bedraggled.

The spheres on the leaves are raindrops now, not dew.

Incomplete – harshness – wandering

Black, Bleak, Brutal

P.S

Went back this morning stumbled over tyre tracks. The winter visitors had been and mowed back nature. Muddied crevices to freeze and trip over. It must happen every year but I didn’t come up here that often in the old world, didn’t noticed the change before. Now I notice everything. Now it’s a daily necessity.

It seems merciless. Where’s it gone? My sap heavy grief spring, the aching summer fullness, becoming dried out brittle pain, vulnerable, fragile, to crack and seep back into the earth.

To follow the natural lines of loss.

And now it’s been raped, torn, ripped from its place.

A forced change

on my nature, something was in motion, moving, growing, feeling with energy, being.

Suddenly out of time, against its curves, imposed,

Savaged, ravaged, abused,

Razed to the ground

Taken

Gone

My bench, my field, my life

Winter has descended

I stand and survey the damage,

then and now

The icy wind and pain bite into me

My gloveless hands ache from the bitterness.

The world still spins

Days tick by

Seasons come and go

Life in motion

Everything moves

Except me

x

Categories Uncategorized

Labour of Love

November 25, 2011 //
0

Nine months have passed for the Earth

Sometime around 4 a.m I tried to find my jeans in the dark

Sometime around 6 a.m I made notes for you and watched the dawn force itself from night

Sometime around 10 a.m I stumble trip, stumble tripped  from the bus to a side room

Sometime around 3 p.m I talked to my boss before rushing to school

Sometime around 6 p.m we tried to do hangman while a nurse flurry bottlenecked the bedside

Sometime around 11 p.m we followed the bed upstairs and laughed at my Mr Bump icepack

Sometime around Friday morning I heard the noises as they fetched the nightstaff

Sometime around Friday I told Dad where the new lunch box was and noticed the weave on the blanket

Sometime around Friday afternoon I met the first of the faces and felt I was being managed

Sometime around 5 p.m I returned after only just getting home to Mum’s expression on the doorstep

Sometime around 6 p.m I sat by the faded flower mural for 45 minutes. In the desolate endless empty cold corridor next to our friend who silently studied his gardener’s hands

Sometime around later the nurse looked down at me saying  ‘he’s very ill isn’t he?’ and I experienced the first of the violent thoughts

Sometime around the evening I followed them to a private office. I watched the slow moving mouths down the wrong end of the telescope

Sometime after when gravity had tripled I shuffled the weight of my leaden legs to the lift

Sometime around 9 p.m I tried to make my voice work to your sister in law whose inhumanity ran free

Sometime on Saturday morning I looked at charts and sat in the orange relatives room. I pressed my head against the glass and watched the reflections of the outside world

Sometime around the afternoon I picked up our son from friends. Their natural garden wound round the doorframe like the crawling bindweed anxiety choking up through me

Sometime around Saturday evening I spoke to your friend as I stared through the debris on the bedside table

Sometime around early Sunday I avoided eye contact with Mum as they drove off. I hung onto your brother for a comfort I couldn’t get. The settee was too low and too soft, his voice a reminder, your rage searing through me, destroying, eating me up from the inside out just as it did to you

Sometime later I misplaced another small bottle of water as I swayed my way past the mural

Sometime in the afternoon I had minutes at home before our son came back. I noticed the TV and felt the raw pain tear up in my throat while my heart thundered and contracted before the doorbell broke through

Sometime around 4 p.m she didn’t know what to say like she didn’t when I first met her and everything was awkward

Sometime around the night I looked up at the rainbow you painted on our sons wall. The eyes in the letter O’s of  ‘My Room’ smiled down at me and I listened to his breathing

Sometime around Monday I listened to your brother spout on about his shiny new mini. The grotesque  carpark abyss, anchored weighted grey and cold in the relentless rain while my feet wouldn’t work

Sometime around the evening I looked at the images you couldn’t see. The narrow room of steely cabinets filed away our life as we sipped icy water

Sometime around the Tuesday car journey your Dad squeezed my shoulder as I replayed your chat on the doorstep

Sometime around afternoon I existed by your brother as our son played with the bead frame counting off the hard wooden seconds

Sometime around then I laboured with the time and the inclination

Sometime around later I gave the coffee back to her as she knelt by me with that expression

Sometime  around that moment their voices wouldn’t fade

Sometime around the evening they pushed me beyond the peeling mural to the relatives room, wheels squeaking on the sanitized floor.

Sometime after they bought me cardboard sandwiches. A pointless platter for my carcass

Nine months ago

I walked through the door, down the hall.  I dropped down close to him on the softness, I sat in my usual place and our son sat in yours. I took his hand and turned to face him.

xx

Categories Uncategorized

End Game

November 8, 2011 //
2

I am aware that it’s colder today. Sat on my bench, can’t see the cathedral in the distance, its hiding in the fog. The bench is cold beneath me and the wind chills my face.

The crows are still around, their caws punctuating my thoughts. I feel alone and protected  at the same time. The hills and clouds and mist roll into one and I’m not sure where I am. Am I back on that other hill with his Mum before she was ill? Smiling into the wind holding my ears to shield them from the biting Northern blasts. That Christmas when I had a secret which I told him on Millenium Eve.

And this coldness brings it all back and I know I can’t sit here for much longer. And the cold wind makes my eyes run into the tears and it feels good.  This morning I like feeling too cold, Is it reminding me I’m still here?

For months I dressed inappropriately. Strappy T-shirt under short-sleeved top, vaguely aware that they were all in hats, coats and scarves. Vaguely aware of a sensation on my arms, defiantly walking through it, weather was irrelevant. I know I am still here now, I am cold. I want to look pale and thin, I want them to notice I look different. This change in me doesn’t come from ‘being a bit sad now and then’, it is gouged out by endless hours of anguish and sorrow, like the sea carving a landscape. It’s the chipping and gnawing away, the wearing down till all that’s left is a scarred kernel of who I was. My ears are starting to ache in the cold. I really need to be wandering in a long dark velvet dress under a black cape with a deep red lining. I should be on the barren moors somewhere but my Hampshire field serves the purpose well and my coat is sufficiently black and swirly.

Right now I am here, I am there, I am then and I am now. I feel the seeping in of winter and the familiar comfort of pain. I know I still exist.

This morning looked like any other as we drifted up to school but we both knew it was different.  He was quite happy about it while I resolutely wrestled with collection of feelings. Now in the final year of Primary, we had spent many months negotiating and moving as his needs changed and I accepted that despite my excuses and reasons, he could walk back part of the way himself. The process started last year, in the old world, as we agreed  staggered pick up points down to the big busy island where I would meet him in Year 6.

When February descended upon us, I reeled it in a little, with hindsight probably more for my benefit than his.  An attempt at normality was essential for him regardless of any torture I felt. For a while I stood my post at the designated spots and nodded weakly at the clumsy, the awkward, the genuine and the pitying glances and words.

And although he had announced he wanted to be met at the island for all of the final year, I sadly (for me) predicted it wouldn’t last once he saw others being given more scope. So last week it was agreed, though we kind of walk up together (as I go that way for my morning walk across the fields) from today, in fact in half an hour as I write, he will walk all the way home for the very first time.  Strategies are firmly in place regarding road crossing, and he will be fine, in fact it will probably start the evening off on a better footing as he’ll be feeling so grown up and not grumpy. We laughed about it this morning as I told him I couldn’t wait to hear the doorbell and in fact would probably climb up on the roof and sit there with a telescope – if I had one…or could climb. He knows to expect a squealy excitable Mummy “my baby’s back!” and now I’ve accepted it, I genuinely see it as a good thing.

My husband would be so pleased. I was often moaned at for holding too tight. I knew as well as he did that closeness comes from letting go and resistance is destructive. So many tales of ‘At his age’  he was roaming the forests with his best friend, pockets full of conkers, scuffed knees and shoes and not a mobile phone is sight. Knowing is one thing – doing is an entirely different creature. But today all the understanding of this essential phase only serves to underline how my world has changed. The day has had a constant film running in the background of images from babyhood and beginnings to toddlers, tears and so many trains (me and my husband ‘just testing them out’ on the kitchen floor late at night before wrapping them up for his third birthday) and the first day at school with my husband’s puzzled expression at my sadness, when to his mind, the Reception class was no different to playgroup. He didn’t get the fact it was the end of five years of full-time Mummying and the start of a slow lengthening of the cord.

So tonight in our ‘new normal’ it will just be me jumping up and down when he proudly returns and no Daddy praise later nor teasing me about how on earth will I cope when he leaves home? We talked about that a while back, (well probably nearly a year ago in chronological time, but it feels more recent,) and we pondered over how different it would be without him in the house…..and now that prospect is a little weird, to say the least, because I know that by that time another ten years or so may have passed and our family will have etched itself into a new way of being.

Today everything has such a strange air of unreality again. I am living in someone elses life and she’s just taking it slowly as her world unravels. My head cannot process the fact that here on such a key day, a day a part of me would have really dreaded, I am kind of taking it in my stride. I remember, I mourn, then I inch gently forward and allow it. Another loss. But a transition that in the scheme of things is more bearable – and next year Secondary School, that huge step we’d discussed many times and now I have to do both parts, and pay appropriate attention to it, (though my focus has shifted to just getting through the day,) in my son’s world it is both different and just as big, and maybe in some ways immense. But we have time to work with it, to explore and encourage, to restate and remind him of all that’s important.

We’ll be ok – he’s moving and shifting. He’s changing and so am I.

Neither of us are who we were on that winter’s night when we rushed back to the hospital, with hope and cold fish fingers in his Toy Story lunchbox, trying to find someone who could update us…and then they did. And the coldness edged in, crept stealthily up my spine, into my heart and soul and buried itself  deeply, permanently within me in the look in my sons eyes when I heard someone (apparently me) stammer out the words about what might happen.

The beginning of the end.

Categories Loss, parenting
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