Acceptance
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.
Certainty
You appear.
Life is certain.
Your love wraps
itself around me.
You surround me.
Then you are gone
taking it all with you.
My struggle, moving from certainty to uncertainty.
My life, condensed to seven lines.
From prison to prism
Your slow dying, your death, and my grief
Have been the most painful experiences of my life.
At first I thought grief was a prison
A place to escape from at some point in time.
Now I’m used to it. It just is. Keeping me close to you
As time and the seasons take you further away.
Two years after your death I realised that
Grief is a prism, not a prison.
A multi-faceted new lens for learning about life and death
Reflecting on our life and searching for myself.
Your last and enduring gift to me.
Your flamboyant blue jacket
You loved that jacket with its big squares
In different shades of blue and cream and
Its stand out in a crowd design.
Its fluffy interior kept you warm as
Your heart became sicker and your
Body became colder because your
Blood wasn’t circulating in the way
Your body needed so you felt
Cold to your bones even in summer but
That jacket held you, closer and closer
Its warm softness enveloping you
Along with my arms and heart
Until you left us forever.
I never liked that jacket but I want it back now.
I need it to hold me in my darkest hours.
The thing with grief is that you never know
What you will want later. Until it’s too late.
Thinking
I’m an over thinker from way back which can be a time wasting occupation, sifting the same thoughts through multi layered filters in my brain over and over again.
But the thing is, I Like thinking. Going down into dark caves, picking up rocks to see what’s lurking underneath, climbing up mountains of new information.
Clearly my mind does too because it Never stops. Somehow the reading, and writing, and thinking, all jumbled up, exposes new pathways.
If I explore enough of them and let the wind blow me where it wants, I can park those thoughts, feelings and memories while I roam further afield through dark shadows filtered with pale morning sun.
Last
Last is such a simple word
An everyday word
A word that suddenly looms
Large after dying and death
- Last walk on the sand
- Last dive under the waves
- Last ride on your motorbike.
A treasure trove of lasts
Buried in my mind
Relentlessly drawing me
Back to our past
- Last time I saw your grey-green eyes
- Your curly brown hair
- Last time we lay entwined.
Last absorbs a lot of my time
Each one studied in minute detail
Transforming facts into images
Imprinted on my brain
- Last groan in your sleep
- Last day at home
- Last breath.
Ashes #2
I know where you are.
I haven’t lost you
You haven’t gone to a better place
You’re in the chunky glass jar
Next to my desk
It’s the right place
Close to me. Visible
Ashes dug up from the spot
You chose in the garden
When I was trying
To get close to you
On death day
Anniversaries 1 and 2.
I’m looking out for you and
You are watching over me
Until our ashes can be
Buried in a remote place
Where we can lie undisturbed
Together.
Together forever.
Death and grief avoidance
Talking about death and grief is not morbid, taboo, or weird….it’s part of life!
The Groundswell Project
I didn’t understand about death and grief avoidance before my partner died. How it’s not just the people around me but many people, many countries, absorbing the cultural norms that have existed for decades and beyond. Passed down in varying forms with each generation hiding behind veils of silence so that we avoid talking about dying, death and grief until its thrust upon us. Then we’re left to work it out for ourselves, or not, every painful step.
I didn’t understand that grief comes in different sizes and that there are no timelines. Earlier family deaths, while very sad, did not have the same intensity and enduring impact as my partner’s dying and death. His experience was devastating for us both, changing me forever and showing so clearly that death ends a life, not a relationship.
It’s been a steep learning curve for independent and stoic old me to express any vulnerability. Emotional new me is a wise woman although it took me a long time to come to terms with this and their ongoing co-existence. For the first time I felt socially isolated from the non-grieving world. I feel personally isolated, because two has become one.
I learnt that there’s a grief island with a bridge to the mainland that few non-grievers want to cross. Some grieving people find their way to the island but many do not. It divides us into the seen and the unseen, leaving many grieving people walking alone with their hidden wounds.
After four years I’m used to the social isolation. Not liking it in any way but not agonising over it in the way I did previously. I can see how I’m too captivated by dying, death and grief for non-grieving others; too disinterested in meaningless other things because I see everything through a death and grief lens.
I see how understanding cannot be learnt from the experience of others, or necessarily from earlier deaths. How we all need to travel our own journey. How I was one of those unknowing people previously.
I feel positive about cultural change after seeing the way people are speaking about the realities of dying, death and grief in so many books and web sites. It seems that a momentum is building and breaking down the barriers of avoidance.
The realities are talked about more openly in a variety of ways. Truth telling is promoted more openly in health practices. A world-wide movement seems to be expanding.
Or is it because I live in this world? Is the acceptance of being your authentic self and openly expressing vulnerability a step too far for many people? Are the avoidance barriers continuing elsewhere? Not just one mountain but a series of mountains stretching away to the horizon?
End of my world
Numb
On the day my world ends
I walk down and around the
Winding hospital corridors
For the last time
No more filling me with dread
Each time I walk in and
A sense of relief, tinged by guilt
Each time I walk out
Stunned
Where amazingly, the blue sky and the
Banksia trees with their grey leaves and
Gnarled seedpods are unchanged
As summer fades into autumn.
People walking by fast and slow
Kids in the playground laughing
Traffic backed up impatient
Their world still turning
Oblivious
On the day my world with you ends.
Then home, alone for the first time
Tall gum trees with smooth spotted trunks
Reaching up into canopies of green
Blue colours that weaved their way
In and around our life
Until they dominate every room
Unchanged, unlike you
Dead.
What am I meant to do now?
Seasons
It starts with one piece of bark floating to the ground, then dozens, then hundreds, until the ground is covered in bark, crunching underfoot, no matter how often I rake. There are small fragments and large sheets, some fine and flimsy like parchment, smooth enough to paint on, others chunky and coarse, too hard to break.
It’s peeling off the giant spotted gum trees, trunks straight and tall, reaching to the sky and shedding their skins like giant snakes in the garden.
The bark is grey/brown on the outside as it clings to the trees and red/brown on the inside as it lifts away, leaving creamy smooth trunks, somehow vulnerable as they are exposed to light for the first time. Perhaps lost without their spots, until they form again as the maturing bark darkens.
Its summer here now, blue sky, hot days, not enough rain. Four and a half years since you died. The seasons are taking you further away from me. I’m lost. Certainty has become uncertainty.
Except the bark. Every spring/summer, without fail, the trees shed their bark.
Writing
I’ve always preferred words to numbers and reading to writing but now I’m addicted to writing about you. It started with fear and the accursed death admin cutting you out of my life. Now it flows out of my mind as emotion in words, unbidden. One thought triggering another about your dying and death and my grief, befriending the pain and turning it inside out through words until I stop fighting it. The pain is still heavy. It still haunts me. But it’s not as sharp as before and miraculously, writing has become my metaphorical lifeline to you.
Emotions
(Stream of consciousness writing)
I’m not angry about anything in particular, nothing that matters to me at least. I’ve been annoyed about the stupid things that happen at work and appalled by the way governments don’t govern or behave ethically, and the pointless violence between people and countries as if people don’t matter, and the way we are wrecking the planet and behaving as if we can keep on doing this forever. Oh hang on, I do care about these things and often speak out about them but what’s the point when it has so little impact. This doesn’t mean I will stop because activism seems to be my middle name but I guess it’s really despair that I feel and frustration combined with futility.
These things fade into the background when I think about you and the great sadness that enveloped me during dying days and has never left. It sits somewhere deep inside, let out occasionally with deep sighs that do not help so I busy myself with distractions like work and writing except writing is not a distraction it’s a way of digging deep, turning over those thoughts to see what’s lurking underneath.
What I see is how you gave up so many things as your heart failure accelerated. Walking on the sand and diving under the waves, the essential start to your daily life was replaced with a slow walk down a long tunnel. Where the open sky was replaced by walls and roof closing in until you were crammed up in a corner with nowhere to go, losing your health, independence, then your identify and dignity in hospital those last months.
If the truth be known, what I really feel is regret. I wish I’d never called the ambulance that last time. You could have died at home in my arms instead of enduring four more months of futile care.
Words #2
My search for understanding of dying, death and grief in
Numerous books, poems, web sites and videos has
Evolved into an introspective look at our life together and of
My behaviour and beliefs and what really matters in life.
My thoughts and emotions are challenged by the
Words of so many insightful writers, poets and speakers
Giving me a rich inner life with knowledge and ideas
That are stretching my thinking
Bringing clarity that helps me travel this journey and
Comfort when I find my thoughts and our experiences
Reflected in their words in so many layered ways.
But also pain when I understand more clearly the
Truth of your long, slow death and my life alone
Which has poured out of me in tears and raw thoughts
Into hundreds of pages of my own newfound writing and
Become my lifeline to you.
Words have taught me that “comfort is the one thing
You cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth
You may find comfort in the end” – C.S. Lewis.
Remains
‘Remains’ is a difficult word
Conjuring up too many
Graphic details for tender hearts
But technically correct for
What is left after a person dies.
I have your cremated remains but
Not your grey/green eyes
Or the scar over your right eye.
Not your brown curly hair
Or your mind, filled with our memories.
And not your sick heart, the
Invisible pump with its slow then
Accelerated decline
Curtailing too much of your life
Before taking you from me. Forever.
I had no idea that the
Part of you I like least
Would be upper most in my mind.
- I hate you heart.
- How long are you planning to haunt me?
The door
If you go through this door
To dying, death and grief
There is no going back.
No unseeing, unhearing or unthinking.
No belonging and no you.
Old me has made space for new me.
We will walk on together. Or stand still.
It’s all I have.
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
Death day
Yesterday, I was feeling ok about my partner’s death five years ago today. I planned to block out the world and was thinking about how things have changed or remained the same after all this time.
But I was bowled over on waking by the pain of five years ago, then watched the clock as it ticked through those critical events – 8:48, 8:49, 8:50 am, first call from the hospital, 9:15, 9:16, 9:17 am, second call from the hospital. Then at 9:50 am a call from the doctor saying that he had died and my involuntary cry OH NO!! aware he was nearing end of life but stunned that it occurred suddenly.
There was no warning in those earlier calls, when his health changes were conveyed in a matter of fact way, as usual. No hint, no caution that this terrible, yet precious time was imminent - 9:43, 9:44, 9:45 am, the time he died. Alone. In Fear.
I’m devastated that he died in this way. If I could turn back the clock on one thing in our life it would be THIS.