Three Months without My Mother

Today is one of many important markers to come.

Three months to the day
Since her life slipped away.
Where have they gone?
Where have they gone?

The world carries on as always – deadlines, exhaustions, overcrowded trains. Yet I can’t find myself in it.

I feel brittle and frail
My hands shaky and pale
I’ve withdrawn from the world
And become inward curled
Where have I gone?
Where have I gone?

unshed

Countless others
Have likened the rain to tears, or tears to rain.
The comparison should have lost its potency through reiteration
Yet, sitting watching drops trickle steadily down the window,
I can think of nothing but how they would feel on my cheek –
Cold rather than hot and salty,
Expressing my sorrow when my body cannot.

Facing the Shadows

My mother’s favourite author was Ursula K. Le Guin. After many years of dreaming of it, she finally wrote a letter to ‘her Ursula’, expressing how important her writing had been to her, and she received a brief but delightful, and heartfelt, reply. I stumbled across it when I was back in South Africa for my mother’s memorials (there was more than one event) in June, as she kept it on the board above her work desk, and it was one of many moments that made me feel both tearful and joyful – tearful because she would never write another letter; joyful because she did eventually write that most important letter, and both the writing and the response were such positive and empowering experiences.

How To Help Friends in Mourning

My mom’s friend Donna emailed the article below to a few friends last weekend. I can’t help wishing that I had been passed an article like this a few years ago, so I could have felt slightly less trepidatious when wondering what to say or do when others had lost loved ones, and it feels like something that should be as widely shared as possible. One of the many powerful realisations for me over the past few months has been how little prepared we are for the dramatic impact of a parent’s death, even when we are adults, and how unacknowledged that is. I have also been surprised at how little I knew about grief, after having only experienced the death of three grandparents and two recently-ex boyfriends, and how hardly anybody – with the exception of those close to me who also feel my mother’s loss powerfully, and a few who have been deeply affect by the loss of a parent, partner, friend or child – seems to know how to relate to me since my mother died. It has meant that I have forged powerful new bonds, while finding some old ones no longer seem to exist, or have dramatically weakened. I remain grateful, however, for those who even without knowing what to say, or how I might respond, have stretched over the chasm regardless.

Caught in a Summer Downpour

Arms outstretched in delight
Smile stretching wide
Laughter bubbling -
Drenched in joy.

When all other expression fails, turn to poetry!

I wrote this poem in September 1996, when I was 14. I stumbled across it tonight, and it suddenly seemed an excellent expression of some of my emotions.

***

I wonder where in the deep dark depths
That some may call my mind
That quiet place
In a turbulent race
To be, achieve, survive…

The where, the how, the what I seek
I can no longer see.
I know, I feel, I sense – and yet
I’m lost, and blind, not healed.

For what can heal but time and love
And caring not besides?
Must not destruct, or tear, or wound,
But seal with loving touch.

To know not how the wound was cut
Or ripped, or torn, or shredded
Is to lack the knowledge of the past
And to future remedies be blind.

And so creativity is bred –
Comes it not from need?
To proceed when pain has shrouded the way
With hurt, deception, sorrow

Is no small feat I know, and yet,
This is the road I must follow.

Giving Sorrow Words

I read a little of Rebecca Abrams’ ‘When Parents Die’  this evening, which my friend Garry, whose father died while he was 12, lent me. It arrived with a heart warming note inside:

‘I hope that when you find time to read this book, you find solace. I know I did, even after many years! It might put a few things into perspective.’

I have been amazed time and again over the past two and a half months, since my mother’s death, how these small gestures of friendship, caring, and solidarity can make such a significant difference, and I will be ever grateful for each and every one.

There have been a few sections in the book that have struck powerful chords with me over the past couple of days, and I feel I need some time to cogitate over each of these a bit further. There are two quotes I would like to share tonight, however. The first is from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and I used it as both my facebook and Skype status tonight:

‎            “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o’er fraught heart, and bids it break.”

Multiplicity

I have been thinking and talking a lot recently about identity and creativity. In part of an email to a friend, Onke, last week, I wrote “I wonder if we all struggle to some degree to acknowledge or recognise our ‘true self’? It is such a flexible and constantly changing thing, responding to our environment and the various roles we fulfil. I have come to believe that we don’t have one self, merely multiple selves that are facets of our complexity. The challenge is to try and give space to sometimes conflicting desires and expressions of being.”

He replied, “As a person and psychologist I do agree with you that we all struggle to reconcile the different aspects that make up our personalities. The challenge really is in accepting and giving space to all the different aspects without being drowned by all of it.”

There is no doubt that I sometimes feel like I am drowning.

Dream-time Revelations

I had what felt like an enormously important dream last night. I had been reading a book called ‘Motherless Daughters’ before going to sleep, and I was clearly trying to resolve some of the issues it raised for me, but I am grateful for the gentle way my mind went about this process.

My Mother’s Hands

Her hands, strong and articulate,
Drawing air-pictures
Whilst describing new perspectives.
 
Digging earth to bring its bounty forth,
Or climbing rock -
She touched the world, and so it touched her back.
 
Her hands that bathed my newborn flesh;
They wiped my tears,
And across distance wrote to soothe my fears.

Those hands turned cold, then turned to flame, then dust.
Yet in my heart, her hands will always be:
Memories wrapped forever around me.