Unbridled JOY
I seem to have a tendency to avoid blogging when life takes one of its more turbulent turns, and so it has been of late. Whilst life continues in its unremarkable day to day way, somehow everything has turned on it’s head, until I feel like I’m walking on my hands, upside down through a sea of molasses.
Not entirely a lifetime ago, I was struck by yet another vicious bout of of wanderlust. When these moments strike, I feel like Vianne in Chocolat. I can hear the wind whispering its message, teasing and tantalising with stories of new places and new adventures and they all look brighter and shinier than where I am right now. I seem to have an affinity with places for a short amount of time, before I feel it passes and I’m on my way to newer, greener pastures. It’s as if my life, mine particularly, is more of a book of short stories or a series of vignettes than a story or a film. It feels less continuous and more like a series of moments that stand out, like connect the dots. I feel drawn to certain places, and certain people, and seem to spend my life following one instinct after another on a journey that’s a little wild and unpredictable, and by its nature seems to throw up beautiful unexpected moments when I least expect them, and when I fear they may have passed me by.
Which brings me to today. I had an uncomfortable start to the day, with a meeting I was dreading. Thankfully it turned out better than expected, and left me in a sardonically amused but quite upbeat frame of mind as I headed in to the second part of my day, which truth be told I was looking forward to almost as much as the first part of the day. Amidst the chaos of our shop in full swing, I slipped out into the back to take a breath, and regain the tattered remnants of my sanity, and as I came out of the corridor, my day suddenly brightened as I saw an acquaintance popping into the shop.
There are some people that you meet randomly, through the course of your life that you just connect with. Inexplicably. People that just upon seeing them make you smile. It’s like a moment of recognition: I GET you. Meeting them again, even momentarily is an event that fills you with joy, and this one was one I had been afraid would pass me by. I thought my wanderlusting might find me gone, without another of those moments of connection, but today the universe threw me a bone.
It really brought home to me something that I had forgotten, about myself and my life, in the turbulence of the last couple of years, and that’s the joy that’s derived from the unexpected moments, the spontaneous acts and the things you wouldn’t and couldn’t have dreamed in a million years. In the turbulence of life that I had tried to control, I’d forgotten the exhilaration of just rolling with it and somehow ending up EXACTLY where you needed to be at EXACTLY the right time. Somehow, without a modicum of control you still meet people who take your day from bog-standard to AMAZING in the blink of an eye, you get a kick in the arse just when you really need it, and at certain privileged points in your life you find yourself in a place where you can make a difference to someone just through being the right person in the right place at exactly the right moment.
Got to say, sometimes life really is just awesome.
August 7, 2010
Dear old Dad
I followed a link from Twitter the other day to an evocative blog by a young woman who had recently lost her Mother to Alzheimers.You can tell from the way she writes that it has been an immensely painful process for her, and the admiration I feel for her, being able to blog about something so IMMENSELY horrible that it feels as though your soul has been nigh-on ripped in two, is almost unquantifiable.
As I suppose is natural, I began thinking back to my own actions when my Father was dying and after he died. It’s not something that I’ve tended to dwell on. In some respects, knowing the end was coming allowed me to do a bit of grieving before the moment came, and the rest has passed in a whirlwind of chaos, time and stoicism. Looking back to then hurts. I want my memories of my Father to be good – to be memories of the vivid, strong, effervescent man he was, not the husk of a man in the hospice bed, waiting for his daughter to say goodbye before he took his last breath. It’s hard to remember the man who turned to you the week before he died and said, ‘I’m tired of fighting now, darling. It’s time for me to give up’ and looking at me almost as if he’s asking my permission, and begging for me to understand. It’s hard remembering that, and harder still to remember myself running from pillar to post, trying to create some last happy moments and failing. It’s easier to say it gets better with time, than to know how important it is to look back at a devastating moment and forgive myself for being less than perfect, to forgive myself for being human and to forgive myself for being me.
Because the truth is, that no matter what happens, how it happens or who it’s with: it’s not pretty. It’s painful, it’s ugly and time seems to pass both too fast and too slow all at the same time. I made mistakes that seemed to take on epic proportions and everything seemed to have added weight or significance because time was short. I remember all too much how imperfect I’ve been as a daughter, all the times I said ‘I hate you’ in anger instead of ‘I love you’. It doesn’t matter how many times I said I love you since those teenage days, they hang back and haunt me and added to some kind of pressure in my head that wanted to make the last weeks and months perfect. I feel guilty because I wanted the whole thing to be over, because it’s so long and drawn out and the suffering is immense. I feel selfish because I wonder how much of that wanting it to be over is wanting him to be free of the pain, and how much is me wanting the horror of the hours, days and weeks to be over. I feel guilty because I desperately didn’t want him to die, because I was afraid that the pain of losing him would be too much to bear. I felt guilty because despite having so long to say goodbye, I never told him all the reasons I loved him, and never even realised them all until he was gone.
And then it happened. And I felt numb. It just didn’t process that one minute he could be in there (just, but just was enough) and the next minute, not. And people wanted to go and be with him after he’d gone and it freaked me out and I couldn’t bear it.
And they expected me to get up and do things and be practical and worry about fucking death certificates while there was a yearning hole inside me that threatened to engulf my entire being. I still don’t know if I can forgive myself for smiling and being practical and doing what needed to be done, when I wanted to be standing on the side of a wild hillside, screaming at the top of my lungs just how bloody unfair this was, and HOW WAS I GOING TO COPE WITHOUT HIM?I still don’t know if I can forgive myself for soothing others when they rang up the house and burst into tears whilst offering their condolences instead of shouting ‘how the hell do you think I feel?’
I wanted to punch every last living soul who quoted me platitutes and told me it would get better, and brain the woman who told me at his funeral that she couldn’t bear to look at me because it reminded me too much of him. I was angry at everyone who didn’t know how to respond and ignored me instead, I was furious with the people who thought that because I was okay on the surface, I wasn’t bleeding underneath. Perhaps I need to forgive them for not knowing how to be, when they haven’t experienced devastation and loss like that, and perhaps I don’t really want to because it reminds me of just how raw it still is three years on, and how vulnerable and lonely everything still is without him.
Time doesn’t really make it okay, no matter what anyone says. All time does is teach me how to function without him. It doesn’t make the sharp stab of loss any less when I hear the busker singing A Modern Major General in Oxford Street, or I hear the London Irish fans raising a chrous of Fields of Athen Rye in support of the team. It doesn’t stop the lump in my throat when I hear someone say ‘stupid boy’ in the tones of Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army or a cheerful ‘my dear boy’. It doesn’t make it any less devastating to see the Father of a friend lead her up the aisle on her wedding day. Everything is slightly bittersweet, because it’s always slightly coloured with the memory of a man who is no longer here.
I can forgive myself for feeling that, because to forget too quickly would be worse, and if time someday eases how it feels to be without him, then perhaps I can learn to forgive myself for that too.
July 23, 2010
