Searching

I have been searching, searching, reading, reading, thinking and writing. Endlessly. Reflecting

on our life. Trying to wring every fragment of pain out of my brain. Looking for new

knowledge about death and life and me. And over time, feeling that this has somehow set

me free. Not of pain and grief but fighting it, the endless fighting.

Intangible gifts

As I wake to silence with a
Heavy heart and endless days alone
Now 4 years and 5 months without you and
Almost 7 months of working at home
I think about how much harder
Alone would have been for you, the socialiser.
Silence and your absence haunt me. Every day.
At least this is something you were spared.
It’s my gift to you and your most enduring gift
To me is life’s hardest lessons about
Dying and death which means I’ll be
Walking to my death with my eyes wide open
Prepared in a way that we were not.

Four autumns

It’s autumn here now.
The day death came
For you four years ago.
The last day of your life.
The start of my life alone.

Four autumns.
Time measured in seasons.
The clocks are keeping perfect time
But you are not in it.
I am incomplete without you.

These things I know.
You are gone but
With me always.
It is not enough.
The silence is too loud.

My yearning is for you
Not the next horizon.
I miss you more than
You will ever know.
You are unforgotten.
I am not unanguished.

The little things

The little things still bring me undone.
Less often. But still.
Small things never noticed before
That suddenly loom large.
Tangible and intangible things
Ordinary everyday things
Surfacing from the clutter
Taking on a monumental significance because
They were touched by you, remind me of you, or
Joined us together in a way that was invisible to others.
They can never be ignored, broken, lost or discarded.

Then and now

I used to wake to the sound of your shower
The click of the door as you left at the crack of dawn
The knowledge that you were out or away but not gone forever.

Now, I wake to a dry mat on the bathroom floor
The main bedroom still littered with your things but not you or me
Because I’m sleeping in the small bedroom, hiding really
And you are dead.

I used to come home to certainty and conversation
Knowing and being known without having to explain context
Your memories of our life and your life. Your arms.

Now I come home to a dark and lonely house
Where silence is waiting, always waiting
A daily reminder that you are not here, will never be here again.
Here, where you used to belong.

That pile of rocks

It’s taken me two years to knock down the high wall of rocks that I built around my emotions while playing stoic old me.

I used to think that pile of rocks was my grief. Now I know it’s your pain and mine, mingled together. Your mental anguish when dying. That slow walk down a long tunnel where the walls and roof closed in until you were crammed up against the end in a small cavity with nowhere to go.

My pain in watching your decline, then afterwards, dredging up every memory of your long health journey. Its bookends of fear. The things we put aside over time as if they never happened.

Until those last eighteen months when your physical decline accelerated and your mental anguish could no longer be contained. I held you close but it wasn’t enough. I should never have called the ambulance that last time. You could have died at home in my arms that day or the next.

Instead of enduring those last four months in hospital and the futile medical care that made your life miserable while you lost everything that mattered. Your home, health, strength, independence, dignity, sense of identity, the sun on your face, the people you loved, the arms that held you, your life.

You were surrounded by people but lonely, brave, afraid, fighting death, wanting to die. “I just want to die, I just want to die”…

I could hear your distress and see the sharpened reality of your body’s disintegration but did not fully understand the depth of your pain until After You Died.

After I read a mountain of books. After I turned those sharp and ugly and heavy rocks over and over looking into every crevice. My lessons learnt.

Now that I know, I can never unimagine the intangible aspects of dying. We were prepared for death but not any way prepared for dying.

That pile of rocks will stay exposed forever. They are still heavy and ugly but not as sharp. It’s easier to look at them every day than lug them around, hidden in my mind.

Searching for connection

I’ve been searching for ways of meeting grieving others in person for more than two years now – in workshops, grief groups, public and private forums or courses about death and dying. It’s not my primary purpose for going. Mostly, I’m seeking information, new knowledge and ideas, and the elusive pleasure of sitting in a room full of people who don’t want to change the subject every time dying, death and grief are mentioned. Mostly, these things are enough.

Along the way I’ve met some interesting people for short and long conversations and a few times we’ve stayed in touch by email, or met up when distance allows. Once I volunteered to organise the logistics so a local grief group could continue as voluntary self-help after the formal program finished.

I’ve learnt that grief, by itself, is not enough. We need to have other things in common for connections to be ongoing - the depth of our grief, the acceptance that it’s ok to not be ok, as well as some everyday interests and general approaches to life. Seems simple but it’s not.

My friends provide the everyday interests and approaches to life but not a connection to grief. My counsellor gets the A-Z of grief. But where is the in between??

Recently, another door opened, following a chance conversation after one of the workshops. Not what I was seeking initially but potentially rewarding as well as challenging. I’ve been invited to join two committees in my local health system as a volunteer health consumer. The focus is on improving bereavement and palliative care services. I can’t get much closer to dying, death and grief than this…and can’t wait to get started!

Somewhere along the way the search for connection became a search for meaning, of living a more meaningful life, and speaking up about dying, death and grief. And maybe, just maybe, the chance to peel back some layers of death and grief avoidance.

The old year

I can’t leave the last year behind.
I’m clutching every
Tiny scrap of it tightly
Tangible and intangible
Useful or not.

Where there was someone
Who suddenly isn’t
His absence shouts.
Loudly.
Needing to be heard
Every single day.

There is no end of year
Moving on.

Ember of hope

The hard times in life were brought painfully home for me when my partner died, in a way that no other family death has done previously.  Our world ended.  My life changed forever. Many things haunt me – his dying journey, my profound and mind numbing sorrow, waking to silence, loneliness, longing, uncertainty, fear. The list is long but after three and a half years, no longer surreal.

I know now that this pain is part of my inner being, not a passing traveller. Emotional new me was a stranger who turned out to be a wise woman. She is here to stay and can coexist with stoic old me. Walking towards pain helps. Reading and writing help. The most painful experiences of my life are also the most enlightening. I’ve learnt a lot, yet know so little. I laugh, especially at work, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy. Lightness of being seems to have disappeared but there is a tiny ember of hope and I want it to be helpful not futile hope. I want to live a more meaningful life.

I know dead

I can’t pretend that you are not dead. Not any longer.

I spent the first two years following Futile Hope when she smiled and beckoned in her ethereal way. But she never delivered.

I yearned for your voice, your black humour, your arms. Every day. I offered my life for a day in your arms. Every day.

I bought your ashes inside from the spot you chose in the garden and put them in a chunky glass jar overlooking my desk so you could watch over me. But really, they are inert. It’s me looking out for your ashes, until we can be buried together in a remote area and lie undisturbed.

It’s the intangible parts of you that remain, buried deep inside me. Not in my heart. It reminds me of your sick heart that haunted us for years. But deep in the recesses of my mind. You are in my thoughts. Every day.

Your ethereal home is in my mind. And my writing creates the lifeline between us.

Silence

I wanted perfect silence, often, when you were alive
When our lives were busy with things that no longer matter to me.

Now, I am surrounded by silence and loneliness
Great wafts of it swirling around me.

It is not perfect in any way. Just certain.
Waking to silence.
One breath.
Every day.

Home

I can never leave this house.
The intangible parts of you have seeped into every part of it.
They are amongst my most precious possessions.
I am haunted by the silence and loneliness.
I will never sleep in the main bedroom with its empty spaces
But moving from our home with your presence is unimaginable.

Security

“At least we have each other”
Words that jump out of the pages of my book.

There is certainty in these words. Security.
It’s what we say when things go terribly wrong.

“We will get through this together”
I said it often when you were dying

Not realising that dying is a lonely journey
No matter how many people surround you

There is only one certainty
And absolutely no security.

“At least we have each other”
How innocent and unknowing it seems now.

“At least we had each other”
My hard reality. I am. You are not.

Fear #2

The hardest anniversary is 14 January
Last day at home.

The hardest lines are that your first heart attack and death
Decades apart, were the book-ends of your health journey
That began and ended in Fear. Alone.
Your Fear was terrifying. But Alone broke my heart.

First in Noumea, that tiny island in the Pacific Ocean
Miles from home for a work conference
Having a heart attack, alone in your hotel room
Where there was no phone because it was
Club Med and you were meant to be out having fun.

I arrived in the middle of the night
Not knowing if you were dead or alive until
You sobbed so hard and long in my arms
One of only two times in our life together
That I saw you totally overwhelmed by Fear
Describing the no phone, the heavy, cyclone proof door
And when you finally wrestled it open, the
Long winding corridors as you dragged yourself
Along the floor with your elbows
Always fight not flight when backed into a corner
Until you came to the lifts and your mate the doctor.

Then weeks in ICU waiting for your heart to stabilise
In a hospital where only French was spoken
Both of us terrified that your life would end there.
The stumbling conversations with the cardiologist
My hotel room littered with your things
The no phone, the tall heavy door
The palm fronds rattling in the wind
The laughing guests like Martians on another planet
While I cried in the bath every night with the
Tap full on so no-one could hear.

Then medical evacuation with the cardiologist who
Warned of the high risk if anything went wrong.
You first on and last off through the side of the plane
your stretcher propped over six seats and
Curtained off from other passengers
For the terrifying ride home.

Open heart surgery gave us a second chance.
We tucked away the fears after this and
During all the other spikes of ill health
Getting on with our life, not understanding that
Fear was banked up in our brains, spilling out in
Mental anguish when your heart failure
Accelerated over those last 18 months and
You lost everything that mattered. During the
Last four months in hospital when your failing health
Reduced our lives to that room, that bed, you would
Often say, “I just want to die”, “I just want to die”.

Then your call the day before you died, totally distraught
Saying over and over “I’m going to die today.”
I realise now that you were caught in the terrible
Ambivalence of wanting death but fighting for life
Wanting to leave your disintegrating body but
Not the arms that held you.
Trapped, just like the hotel room and hospital
Far from home. But this time

Dying suddenly the next morning before I could get there
When I had promised you over and over we would
Travel this journey together, to the end
You died Alone and Terrified.
It broke my heart then. It breaks my heart today, it will
Break my heart every time I think about it.