The Benefits of Blogging

Wow, what can I say, it’s GREAT to be back in Blog-land! My inbox was cluttered today with likes, new followers and comments, and I realised that I had once again focused purely on my internal process of writing therapy, and had forgotten the buzz that comes along with a new post. Thank you to all those who took the time to like, comment, email or facebook me – you’re all amazing! I am always touched by the words of support, understanding or gratitude that so often follow when I open my heart to the world. One new colleague, who has been becoming a friend, and who lost her own mother as a teenager, touched my heart by writing, ‘It’s quite inspiring ‘cause I’ve always kept that stuff very quiet and personal…it’s really awesome to read you speaking about it so openly and frankly!’ My response was, ‘I find it fascinating how differently we all deal with grief. For some of my family it is intensely personal, private and silent. I was amazed that for me somehow I wanted to open up and share – and that it has helped me heal, and helped others too, by giving words to emotions they have felt but been unable or unwilling to express.’ Blogging has been such a vital part of that experience for me, and I am so grateful that this incredible tool is still here, waiting for me to be ready to take it up and make use of it again.

This evening I find myself full of plans for the challenging month ahead, feeling strong and positive.

Friday Sorrow

It comes without warning sometimes, the intensity of missing my mother – and today it has swept in with the wind and the rain, leaving me feeling raw and exposed.

I still find that the various losses in my life – whether in the distant past, those that are still fresh, or even those that are merely impending – are emotionally intertwined in unpredictable and complex ways. Sometimes the triggers are obvious; at others subtle enough to leave me grasping for answers, muddling cause and effect.

In eight weeks, after seven and a half years in London, we will move back home to South Africa. This is mostly a very exciting event that we are eagerly looking forward to – to be close to our families, to have a morning view over a lush green valley rather than endless streets and houses, and even a sweet Saint Bernard puppy named Sparky waiting to charm us.

What I really want right now, however, is my mother: at the end of an email or Skype video chat, to get excited with me, to give me sensible packing advice, to help us find solutions to the remaining problems we haven’t yet solved, to understand that leaving behind this wonderful city and all the friends we have made here has its own sadness, and most of all my mother waiting for me in Cape Town, so we could spend another Christmas together at last.

A Year Has Passed…

The excitement and anticipation of climbing onto an aeroplane for a weekend of new experiences with an old friend has its own unique thrill. Here, in the space between leaving and arriving, I find a moment of calm in which to begin to piece together the past few weeks.

The anniversary of my mother’s death was, predictably, not as I had expected. It has loomed menacingly on the horizon for months, evoking a feeling of unease and fear, yet blew in on a crisp, refreshing wind. Her partner Dirk flew from Cape Town to London a week before the anniversary, and after I had completed a delightful 10km running race on the following Sunday morning – a major health milestone for me – we all drove down to Cornwall to spend the week with some very good friends of my mother (who, over the years, have become friends to us all). To complete the group, my mother’s lovely cousin Connie and her delightful dog, a whippet named Agent, joined us as well.

The week was filled with beauty, adventure, comfort, superb food, and wonderful company. I walked barefoot and felt my city-tender feet reconnect with the earth, and revelled in the open spaces. Dirk had brought my mother’s wetsuit along as well as his own, and was planning a 5.18km swim that they had wanted to do together later in their fateful holiday last year. He took me for my first ever long sea swims during the days before the anniversary, and I was so captivated by the wild magic of the sea that, despite my inexperience and lack of training, I decided to try and swim at least part of the way with him. We arranged for one of our hosts, Annie, to take over from me in the second safety kayak, alongside my husband in the first kayak, and strapped my paddle to her craft so that when I got tired I could clamber on with her and paddle to the finish.

Dirk and I about to embark on a 2km training swim to Gull Rock (the island in the background) the evening before the ‘big swim’

I could write an entire short story about the experience of that swim, but for today let it suffice to say that Dirk and I swam the whole way alongside each other, slowly and steadily, for 3 hours and 10 minutes, from Gull Rock to Portscatho. There were times I felt angry that chance dictated I was the one swimming in that wetsuit at that moment rather than my mother, but I moved through the anger to an acceptance that all I could do is feel grateful that I was able to be there at all, carrying forward a small part of her plans and dreams as best I could.

We ended the day by watching a video of her memorial for the first time, after my best friend had managed to get the footage to my brother, and he to edit and upload it onto a website we could access. More than anything I found the video inspiring – it reminded me of how fully she had lived her life, and how many people she had profoundly touched. Her legacy is within us all, and we carry it forward in our own unique ways.

The next morning we watched the video my brother put together last year of clips of my mother herself. This was the most powerful part of the week for me, as seeing her there in front of me – hearing her voice, watching her playing with her grandchildren or a game of volleyball – I could suddenly see exactly what was gone from our lives. The old familiar ache of her loss hit me right in my stomach, and the tears flowed freely once again, but the most interesting result of feeling this intense loss again was realising that it had been predominantly absent for some time. Somehow, what this anniversary gave me was the realisation that while I will never stop missing her, loving her, and wishing she was still alive, and the journey of grieving her will continue in its various forms and phases throughout my life, the loss is finally becoming easier to bear.

On holiday in Cornwall in 2008, with our hostess, Annie, on the far side of her

Tearless Distraction

I have been unconsciously distracting myself from the rapidly-approaching first anniversary of my mother’s death, which will arrive all too soon on May 31^st. I have become busy again with many projects and plans, being productive and constructive and feeling increasingly connected to my body and the world around me, in new and surprising ways.

I still think of her every day, and smile at the photographs of her on my fridge, but I have not been making space for sorrow, and I have been feeling an increasing edginess that nudgingly reminds me that soon, sometime soon, I need to. So tonight I posted a poem and some links to songs that remind me of her, and her death, on the memorial website that was created for her, and I listened to those songs, one at a time. Last year, they had me weeping time and time again, but tonight I find the tears that have dried up these past months are not yet ready to flow.

I hope they do soon. The ache I begin to feel when they are absent reminds me of a poem I wrote (and posted) last August whilst sitting on a red London bus on a rainy day:

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.

Musical Introspection

I was sitting alone in a café in Amsterdam when I first really noticed the lyrics to Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall’. The lines that initially struck me were

‘So I’ll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end’

I know that a year before these words would not have had the same power for me, and I would have hummed along to the catchy tune without really paying attention to the meaning held within it. Mortality quite simply didn’t hold the same significance for me before I found it staring me in the face inside my mother’s coffin, and experienced the reality of how swiftly and unexpectedly our lives can slip away. I have always seen my mother as a mirror in so many ways – an older self, a self I wanted to grow towards, a self that I could be. I realise now how much I in fact saw myself in that coffin.

Thoughts from a funeral

I am fascinated by my ever-changing relationship with death. It is not something that greatly influenced my life prior to my mother’s death nearly ten months ago, but it has been evolving into a more ingrained aspect of my consciousness, and quite simply an increasingly solid concept. I know now, in a way I never fully wanted or needed to accept before, that any one of the people that I love may irreversibly disappear without warning. I don’t fear death, although I worry about the consequences of my own death on those I love. I seldom bring myself to imagine how their loss would change me, and my life’s journey, but the unimagined become nightmares and phantoms…

The Dance of Life and Death

My gift to my mother on her 50th birthday was a fountain pen, and shortly after her death her partner Dirk returned it to me, saying that it seemed appropriate for me to have it. I was deeply grateful for this thoughtful gesture, as I had not yet thought of the pen myself, and it is an immensely personal and delightful implement to have and use as a way of feeling close to her. I sometimes imagine the words that may have flowed from it when held in her hand, from work notes to shopping lists, or the doodles she used to draw sometimes whilst on the telephone, and I smile.

Small Milestones

Today is my fifth day in King’s College Hospital, and I finally remembered to ask my husband to bring my ipod with him when he visited. Once he (looking exhausted) and our boys (full of energy) had left, I uncurled the headphone cables excitedly, chose my favourite playlist, and lay back, feeling my heart lift as Jack Savoretti’s ‘Wonder’ shut out the chatter of other visitors and patients (I first typed ‘inmates’ and had to think for quite some time to find the right word to replace it with. A classic Freudian slip).

Simple Grief

I sang Greg Brown’s ‘Spring Wind’ as a lullaby to my youngest son today, and it is the first time in many months I have sung it. It was a song we played at my mother’s cremation, and it brings back powerful memories of the weeks after her death – I know I have mentioned it in previous blog posts. It was a relief to feel grief flood me again, and tears trickle down my face. In all the complicated emotional turmoil of life, the simple clarity of missing my mother seemed suddenly easier than anything else. It was easy to recognise, name, and understand. I still find that while the whole process of grieving is a huge, messy, unending and ever-changing process that is entirely unpredictable and sometimes impossibly difficult, it occasionally contains straightforward moments of pure loss that feel like a gift.

Six Months Without My Mother

Summer turned to winter; half a year is gone.
Six months, 6 – so neat, it doesn’t sound so long.

My grief is not neat.

My journey is not linear.

My sorrow does not rhyme
(most of the time).

This marker feels an empty one to me,
Its tidiness finding no resonance in my unsettled heart.

I have not found whatever I was seeking for today,
Perhaps a way to keep my fears at bay?
But I have found within this night instead
Merely that you are still, and forever, dead.