Words
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.
Couples
I started looking at couples
After my partner died.
They were everywhere
As if they had multiplied overnight.
The invisible becoming visible.
Haunting me. Taunting me.
They faded into the background
For a while but now they are back.
I’m looking more closely.
Staring, absorbing every detail.
The way they walk and sit.
How they touch and look at each other.
The way their clothes seem to match.
How they seem to grow into each other.
The young ones chattering and laughing.
The older ones quieter, comfortable, belonging.
If I gaze long enough tears well up.
I don’t know what I feel…
Is it envy, desire, sorrow, longing?
Contrasting silences
We loved the neighbourhood silence when we moved here in 2012, broken only by the sound of birds, the wind in the trees and occasional voices but few cars or other city noises.
We weren’t aware of the noise inside, the sounds created by two people, or the difference between inside and outside silence. Silence moved inside after you died. Not during your last four months in hospital but after you died.
The absences are stark: your breath next to me, the sound of your shower, the click of the door as you left at the crack of dawn, the cooking noises as you rattled around in the kitchen at night, your voice and laughter, our conversations and companionable silences.
I still love the silence outside but the silence inside haunts me.
Precious normality
On what would turn out to be our last glimpse of precious normality
With family help and a wheelchair, we went out to lunch in the sun
At a familiar café near the beach where the waves crashed on the shore
The sea reached out to the far horizon and the
Seagulls squawked, flying ever closer in hopeful circles.
I took a family photo not knowing it would be your last.
We planned more lunches in the sun, repeatedly but
You were never well enough when the day came and
After a while, I realised it was the planning that
Mattered, along with hope, no matter how futile.
When I look at that photo now, I can see how sick you were then.
It jumps out at me in a way it did not when I saw you every day.
How are you?
“Hello, how are you?”…. “I’m fine thanks, how are you?”
The ordinary, everyday questions that we ask and answer countless times in our lives.
When we are well and happy, they are simple questions and we respond without thinking. In workplaces or at social gatherings we ask them repeatedly and anticipate a simple answer.
For people who are sick, grieving, or fighting demons, ‘how are you’ is a loaded question, a stumbling block, a truth or dare consideration. ‘I’m fine’ often means ‘feelings inside never expressed’. It might mean ‘fragmented, insecure, needy and emotional’ or any other combination of not well words.
It took me a long time to adjust to ‘how are you’ after my partner died. To learn that it’s a custom not a genuine question and tears are not the right response for most people. To realise that a quick ‘I’m fine thanks, how are you’ was the best way to deflect attention from myself and not create difficulties for the other person.
In a wider context, it’s part of our culture of death and grief avoidance and emphasis on happy endings.
Absence
Waking to silence is my daily reminder that you are not here and will never be here again. The main bedroom is still littered with your things but not you or me because I’m sleeping in the small bedroom, hiding really, and you are dead.
It’s lonely, not hearing the noise of your shower. Always stepping out of the shower onto a dry mat. No longer hearing the click of the door as you leave at the crack of dawn. Not knowing that you are out or away but always coming home.
At night, I pause under the trees, steeling myself to put the key in the door where silence is waiting. Where you were the foodie with a passion for cooking. Now I’m the impostor fumbling around in the kitchen with cupboards full of your unused cooking equipment, before eating alone.
All your knowledge is gone now, everything you ever learned, or heard, or saw. The bookshelves are full of the facts that you devoured from rock and roll history to great speeches of the world. But I don’t miss the facts, what I miss are the intangibles.
The certainty and security of our love. Talking without needing to explain context. The unfinished and the never started conversations. A relationship where we can be ourselves without pretence, whether happy or grumpy, agreeable or annoying. Your memories of our life and your life before me, along with opportunities for reminiscing and filling forgotten gaps.
I yearn for your voice, your black humour and your arms. Wearing your t-shirts next to my skin it is not enough, I am incomplete without you. I need you to come back so we can lie entwined.
The truth of your long, slow death and my life alone has poured out of me in tears and raw thoughts into hundreds of pages of newfound writing which has become my lifeline to you. Where there was someone who suddenly isn’t, absence shouts loudly, needing to be heard every single day.
Tourism
I’ve thought about your mates often, those kind and generous men of all ages, the beach boys who surf, swim or run every day at the crack of dawn, then meet over coffee for a good yarn, joking and teasing each other because that’s how they connect.
How they provided precious normality in your life when your world had shrunk to health and home. I’d drive you to the café every morning when you could hardly walk. You’d refuse a ride home with your mates, not wanting them to see your struggle climbing into cars.
How D. told them you were so chirpy that last Christmas morning when he stopped to say hello, not knowing what it cost you to be upright and put on a joking mask. How they told each other you were having a great day when you were high on painkillers during those last months in hospital.
They stuck by you to the end but didn’t understand because you were leader in dying, the one to die first. They still don’t get it, often asking if I’m going to move, as if erasing our home with your presence is an essential next step in my life.
And so it is with dying, death and grief. The stark contrast between my life and those around me who fly in and out, or not, as tourists. I’m the first widow, probably no longer a wife in their eyes, though I’m still that too. Our connections about grief are superficial because it’s not their loved one, not their experience, not their time to live on grief island.
Most of us are locals and tourists at different times in our life. It just is.
Happy endings
Cultural emphasis on happy endings infuriates me.
It judges
Suffocates
Blocks emotion
Encourages avoidance
Isolates grieving people
Leaves important truths unsaid
Locks vulnerability in a closed box and
Perpetuates ignorance about dying, death and grief.
Lifting up rocks and peering into dark crevices has been
Far more helpful for me than faking happy endings.
Being understood
What hope do grievers have of being understood when we
have a culture of treating emotion as bad and stoicism as good?
When being strong, brave, silent or stoic is admired and
crying, sadness, despair and longing are things to be fixed.
When we teach children, and boys in particular, not to cry and the
sayings ‘cry like a girl’ and ‘men don’t cry’ are linked to weakness.
When people feel guilty for ‘making us cry’.
When we medicalise normal and healthy emotions.
When we shut down grief with veils of silence.
When we value truth but not in grief.
What hope?
Six word stories
Ernest Hemmingway wrote a story, complete in just six words:
“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn”.
I’ve been experimenting….
You - then me
Smart, funny, gregarious, opinionated, loyal, generous.
Lover of people, beach, books, me.
You the socialiser. Me the organiser.
You always showed up for people.
Hope versus heart failure. Hope lost.
Your dying will haunt me forever.
Gone are the days of certainty.
Silence. The sound of missing you.
Your name. It silences the conversation.
I was precious to someone once.
Better?
Five and a half years after my partner’s death, sad and lonely seem to have settled in my bones. It’s hard to accept that this is my life now but it is. I wake to silence. I put on my normal mask to go out and come home to silence. It’s always waiting in his absence.
Friends and family provide company but they have their own lives and families. I’m not their principal person and it’s not the same as intimate partner connection.
My grief is not the gaping wound of early years but can it ever heal? When a lifelong partner dies can any of it be better? No, better is a word that belongs to the past - it was so much better before.
Rule keepers
Here’s me, waiting for a minor operation, in and out in the same day. I’m alone. Alone is ok. In the past I would always have gone alone, playing stoic old me. Then returned home to you.
A young couple enter, arms around each other. They sit closely, touching, concerned, protected. He waits until she goes for surgery. Staff will ring when she is ready and he will take her home. Together. It’s what couples do.
Tears well up in my eyes. I will never experience together certainty again.
The Rule Keepers discuss the departure rules, requiring me to be with others for twenty-four hours after a general anaesthetic. So I lie.
I tell the junior Rule Keeper that I need to take a taxi home (true, though I may walk), that three builders are doing house repairs (true), then family will collect me later for a night with them (a lie). The head Rule Keeper doesn’t like it but I stand my ground and sign the disclaimer form.
When it’s over, they escort me downstairs to the taxi. I stay at home, alone. Sure, something could go wrong but I will be vigilant and seek help if needed. It could go wrong any damn day or night so what’s the difference?!
This is my life now. Alone. Those Rule Keepers have no idea.
Unused
It is difficult to eat alone
After years of eating with you
The foodie and lover of fine dining
Fond of complex cooking experiments and
Scattering dirty remains across the kitchen.
The kitchen is still cluttered with your implements
Crowding the drawers when I only ever use three
Your pots and pans gathering dust in dark cupboards
My evening meal prepared in haste with
Little interest except in minimising the task.
Your chair at the table unused along with
Absent dinner guests who reside in the past.
Words #3
I’ve been thinking about words recently. How they are front and centre in our lives but so familiar they are often taken for granted.
What a gift they are. Spoken words that connect us to others. Written words in books and multiple other paper and electronic sources that can be an endless source of fascination for readers. Words waiting patiently for a new set of eyes, a new thought, a simple or world changing idea. Evolving slowly over centuries. Taking many forms, including helpful, powerful, provocative, boring, or harmful.
Thoughts flowing out of our minds in spoken or written words, some mentally pulled apart and reworked before being released, while others slip out spontaneously without thought. Some joyfully, others bringing lasting regret. Many thoughts forgotten unless they resurface at another time.
Reading, writing, talking and thinking (in any order) helps me to reflect and analyse. It’s one of my favourite occupations, last thing at night and first thing in the morning then intermittently during most days. When I’m annoyed or upset, words and thoughts haunt me, insisting on repetition. I learnt a long time ago that the best way to put them aside, at least temporarily, is to write them down. Even a brief scribble works - in bed, in the car or while watching TV - with a few curses and exclamation marks when needed.
I’m a latecomer to writing openly about very personal and emotional experiences. It took deep grief and a chance encounter with a grief writing program, then long term connection with many of the program participants, to experience the heartfelt benefits of expressing deep feelings in writing. It’s such a simple process, I wish more people understood that many difficult truths don’t need to be fixed, just heard and acknowledged without judgement.
There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen. ~ Rumi
The last year
Only one thing in life is absolutely certain – we are all going to die. Or as Clive James famously said, “stop worrying, nobody gets out of this life alive.” It’s hard to face the reality of this in our death and grief denying culture where conversations are avoided and death is something we see on TV but rarely in real life, unlike earlier generations when most people died at home.
In my partner’s health journey, doctors warned him about death on a numbers of occasions. After his first heart attack in Noumea. Before the medical evacuation home. When we arrived at the hospital. Before open heart surgery several weeks later, as we grimaced at each other during the information session with other patients and their families while the gruesome details of the operation were explained. Then decades later, “you’re at high risk of death” before a pacemaker/defibrillator implant.
The open heart surgery gave us a second chance at life in the decades before K. died and we were grateful for this. But it couldn’t prevent his subsequent heart failure and the life changes that come with a chronic illness. The things that K. loved disappeared one by one over a long period as his health declined. It started slowly at first and we didn’t pay a lot of attention as each activity slipped away – riding a surf ski, international air travel, long distance driving. There were always other activities and interests to take their place.
In his last twelve months as K’s decline accelerated, the messages from his cardiologist were couched in gentler terms – “you’re not going to get better,” “there’s no need to see me anymore, your GP is the best person from here on, “ring me at any time if you need to” while looking straight at me.
I should have rung but I didn’t know the right questions. Although we both had health backgrounds and experiences with ten family deaths, this was our first personal experience of living with dying every day. We were prepared for death, and had known for years that K. would most likely die before me, but we were not in any way prepared for dying.
I can see now that this is not surprising. Experience of living with a dying loved one is rare today. In our families, the other people who died were not our primary responsibility. They died suddenly, lived with others, or we didn’t have a close relationship. Those who lived to their 80s or beyond died in varying types of aged care. Whist all their deaths were very sad, those in earlier generations were not unexpected (perhaps an ageist thought when I was younger and my concept of ‘old’ was much younger than it is today). Importantly, after each family death we always had our own life to go back to with each other and the kids.
K’s last twelve months were difficult. Every loss that he experienced had an impact, curtailing his life considerably. Giving up driving when his movements slowed. Using a walking stick when out, then a four wheeled walker. Then housebound except for medical appointments. Then bed bound during his last four months in hospital.
It’s heartbreaking to watch the final decline of the person who is central to your life. It’s like a slow walk down a long tunnel where the roof is open to the sky at first. Then the walls and roof slowly close in until he was crammed up against the end in a small cavity with nowhere to go.
In this time, K. lost everything that mattered to him - his health, strength, independence, dignity, hope, sense of identity, familiar life, enjoyment of food and any activities, the sun on his face, his home – and finally, the people he loved and the arms that held him.
Heart failure always wins. It just keeps taking things.