Grace and Grief

"Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies.
No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain
but has her death in it.
The silence of her dying sounds through
the carousel of language, it's a web
on which laughter stitches itself..."

from "Memorial" by Norman MacCaig


September lengthens like shadows in the falling light. The trees let go and abandon their leaves and memories of her last days haunt like ghosts... Her ragged breath and the dark hollows of her eyes. The way her hands shook as she tried to eat. The silence that stretched for hours.

Sat in a room full of people last night, I was asked to tell them a little about myself. I was tongue-tied as usual. We will be doing life together for the next two years, there will be no hiding. "What would you like us to know about you?" the tutor prompts. I play it safe and tell them about my marriage, my three children, the places I've lived and the work I've done. The story I didn't tell is the true one... Once upon a time there was a mother who had a daughter... I don't know how it ends.

Three years feels like a long time and yet no time at all. Tomorrow isn't promised. I wake in the dark this morning and watch the sky lighten, trying to find a balance between grace and grief. My littlest  one wakes too and finds me in the half-light. She slips her arms around my neck and I pull her close, my hope, my chance of a happy ending... Once upon a time there was a mother who had a daughter...

It all counts

"...what's redemptive about every relationship, is accepting this one truth - that it all counts, that the good and the bad are part of the alchemy of loving someone, the base elements break and boil and bleed, but one day there's gold. Then you are able to say, despite everything: I wouldn't be the person I am today if not for you." 

AMY HOLLINGSWORTH  from "Letters from the Closet"

I keep your letters in a box high up on a shelf. I need a ladder to get to them. It's better that way because I have a habit of glancing back over my shoulder, always trying to keep the past in view.
I dared to tell you once, how not a day goes by when you don't cross my mind. I hoped you'd understand, that you'd know I didn't say it to change anything but only because I was tired of skirting around the edges of myself, of trying not to remember and pretending none of it mattered. It all counts - that's the only way I can make sense of it, how I have never been able to lose sight of you after all these years. I thought I had to define it somehow: right/wrong, love/friendship, past/present... I thought maybe if I could just separate out the base elements I could undo whatever you are to me and never once look back again.
The truth is I carry you with me always, a part of who I was and who I am, where I've come from and where I'm going. I can't help but remember us, seventeen, an ocean apart, wanting and waiting for the distance to disappear. I think that seventeen year old me will always be waiting. Many years from now, when every hair on my head has turned grey and my life can be read from the lines on my face, there'll be a knock on the door. I'll answer it and you'll be standing there and I won't be surprised.
It will feel like a promise that in the end, despite everything, we kept.

Writing Down the Bones

“I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life...I am trying to come alive, to find the distance in my own recesses and bring them forward and give them color and form... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.” 

NATALIE GOLDBERG  from "Writing Down the Bones"

I stop writing down the bones and start to feel for them instead.  Watching the numbers fall away, I think I can keep myself from falling. It's not about wanting to be thin, but about trying to balance the weight of it all.  It started over half a lifetime ago when I carried hurt inside that felt like I'd been cut right open and sown up again with a belly full of rocks. I wanted nothing more then than to be pure spirit, to be free of all that held me down.

I write to make myself see these things, to remember how the scars were made and how the pain was fleeting. I'm a burden-carrier. I've always known it. But to carry the weight of others' broken I need to learn to carry my own. My strength lies in words. I forget it over and over again and forget to eat instead. I write to make sense of my life; to untangle the wild, crazy, bewilderingly beautiful mess of it all and hope that after the unravelling and the reravelling, the spinning and the weaving, I might yet count it all joy.

A Marriage

"You are holding up a ceiling
with both arms. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fall down on you. Your arms 
are tired, terribly tired,
and, as the day goes on, it feels
as if either your arms or the ceiling
will soon collapse.

But then,
unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Someone,
a man or a woman,
walks into the room
and holds their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.

So you finally get
to take down your arms.
You feel the relief of respite,
the blood flowing back
to your fingers and arms.
And when your partner's arms tire,
you hold up your own
to relieve him again.

And it can go on like this
for many years
without the house falling.

MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL

The wait can be long,
much longer than you think you can bear.
Doubt and despair creep in to stand either side of you.
They weaken your resolve, question your strength
and soon your arms are trembling and you're wondering
if the house falling wouldn't be such a bad thing.

But then,
not so unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Those who love you both,
who stood with you on that day all those years ago
when you promised each other forever,
walk into the room
and hold their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.

And it can go on like this
for as long as it takes.

Dear R
I said I had nothing to give you but words. They are all I have and I'm afraid they're not enough.

When I was little I would sit in my nanna's kitchen and watch the rain pour down outside through the high window above the sink. It wasn't set low enough to see anything but the sky. She would tell us to look for a patch of blue - enough to make a sailor a pair of trousers because then we would know that the rain would soon stop and the rest of the day would be fine. We could go out to play and she could hang her washing on the line. The old twin tub would be swishing away in the corner, that warm soapy smell filling the room and she'd tell us about how back in her day if you didn't get your washing on the line by 10am, the neighbours would think you slatternly and tittle-tattle about your tardiness. You always pegged your smalls beneath a sheet because you didn't want all and sundry seeing those - not when you had to look them in the eye at church on Sunday morning and say "Peace be with you."

I slip into the past again to escape the present.

I watched the sky then, I watch it now.  I'm starting to doubt that the blue will ever come. These are the darkest clouds I have ever seen. You called it the perfect storm. You left and I didn't know where you'd gone. I'm so afraid that one day you won't come home.

Over twenty years I have watched this thing chase you. You are tired of running. Maybe it's time to turn and face it, to finally name what it is that hunts you down. I promised to stand side by side with you - for better and for worse, in sickness and in health. It's the one promise I have always believed in, the one I will keep.

Lx

I have a restless heart.
Like a kite on a string,
always tugging in the wind.

There are days like today
when I forget where I am.
I fill a saucepan with water,
place it on the stove,
then can't remember why.

I'm half a world away
flying sky high
in another time and place.

The fickle wind drops
and I'm hurtling to the ground
bracing myself for impact...

I wish I could remember
how much it hurts to fall.

What makes you come alive

Dear R

You wake early again this morning and are up and at it before the birds have started singing. I can hear the click-click of the keyboard from the warmth of our bed as you prepare another case. Every day you bind your life up in court bundles and pink ribbon and carry the weight of so much broken and too many wrongs to make a convincing right. It's either late to bed or early to rise and more often than not, both. Burning the day away at both ends doesn't leave enough to live in the middle. I ask you if you're ok and you say you're tired but I know sleep won't fix this.
You didn't know this was what you wanted to do when we married. In those first years you were alive  in the freedom of following wherever a whim took you and I was the one who slept-walked through the days. Now it's you falling asleep in the shadows. I wish we could figure out a way for us both to be fully alive together right now.
You see me print out an application form for a job I don't really want and you tell me to lay it aside. I thought it might help, ease the burden somehow, but you say you would rather see me happy. That makes me cry - that you count my happiness above your own. You would keep the flame alive in me, bending low to cup your hands around it, breathing life into the embers until I'm singing gold.
You are all ash and I long to see your Phoenix rise. I have nothing to give you but words. You won't believe them but they will tell you what I see, what I've known all these years  - what it is that makes you come alive...

Lx