Welcome to my blog – with extras! Extras like courses and events, cup of tea sessions, meditation recordings and podcasts, poetry and stories.
I am an elder woman: I’ve seen a lot of life and a lot of death, navigated many transitions and passed through numerous thresholds. I have worked in many different capacities but all of them are simply vehicles for my particular shape of love. This website is one way of offering my love and my gifts to you.
Please do feel invited to write to me, send poems, images and so on – I would love to hear from you.
I hope you will leave my site feeling warmer, comforted, smiling on the inside and in some way accompanied.
With love,
Nickie
“[Nickie is] like a magic porridge pot overflowing with love to give”. S.E.
- In anticipation
The losing begins long long before the loss
The sadness grows long long before the tears
We speak of acceptance long long before we know it's reality
We have the words to help and comfort
We are not always comforted
Ros Forge
Thank you to my dear friend Ros for this poignant poem. It stands alone and needs no commentary from me. It has though got me musing.
First one….
I’ve never written about anticipatory grief in these pages. Not how it was when my son told me he was a heroin addict and the shadow of his death passed before my sight and I knew I could not save his life and that if there was any saving to be done it could only be if he wanted and chose it. Not how he yoyo-ed between using and refusing, lying and trying and my hope and fear yoyo-ed with him. Not how each new threat – jumping off a multi story car park, sealing himself into his bathroom with a lit BBQ while lying in the bath with a syringe full of heroin, staying another night in the police cells after being arrested for violence, calling from the supermarket demanding money in his account immediately or he’d steal, homelessness and sleeping rough in a dangerous city – loaded dread into my belly and leached joy from my bones. If he was hanging on by his fingernails, so too was I. While he contemplated whether or not he wanted to be alive, I contemplated how to live with my child’s suffering while anticipating how I would live with his death. The irony is that when he actually died he’d been clear he wanted to live.
….and then the other
I could tell you how, leaving the hospital ward after I’d been told that my unconscious husband had “a swelling in his brain consistent with a brain tumour”, I entered the lift alone, slid down the wall and said to God, “If you’re for real you have to hold me now.” How I wanted to believe him when he said he’d make it through 5 years – “people do, why not me?” How walking up the high street gathering a few last bits for our holiday, I saw him on the phone.
“The hospital”, he said, “they want me in. Results show…” and as I saw his death speeding towards me, panic and dread choked and floored me. I didn’t know when would be the last time we made love, the last time we slept beside one another, the last time we would kiss goodnight or say good morning, though I anticipated the inevitability of each last time. I knew the hospital bed would one day become obsolete but I had not ‘foreheard’ the silence once its buzz was turned off.
Perhaps silence was one of the most surprising things. Suddenly there was no doing to be done for the one I loved, no medication to give, meal to cook, call to make, anecdote to share. If you live alone in a house you once shared with them, there is no longer another heart which beats, their body no longer occupies a space – although I think I imagined it did, unable to take up more than my side of the bed or sit on his side of the sofa.
The how of grief
I did not anticipate the ‘how’ of grief. I had perhaps imagined that I would weep and share and let myself be held. I did not. Left to my own devices I would have become a recluse. I have come to see that the path of grief is not only unique for each person but for each relationship that person grieves and it’s not for second guessing.
I was talking yesterday with the husband of a friend of mine who died last year. I wrote about her death in these pages, how, as the trees let go of their leaves, she let go of life. Her principles, her husband said last night, were scientific. I think her long relationship with nature had brought her to an understanding which was perfectly aligned with the spiritual principles she lived by, perhaps best expressed by Thich Naht Hahn. She would leave the husk of her body behind and it would return to the earth; she would, like a wave, sink back into the ocean. Her cognitive understanding and her heart’s sense of rightness were in accord and it felt as if no debris littered her own passage nor remained to be cleared up by her family after she had died. They had had 4 years to anticipate her death and watch her anticipate it with grace and faith and – it seems to me from where I am sitting – their grief now and how they choose to engage with it, is unencumbered.
Unanticipated
I think often as human beings we think in terms of worst case scenarios – I hold up my hand to that one. Perhaps it is a defence against feeling unprepared, unable to cope. But life – and death – have a way of not being predictable. What I did not predict was how much more deeply I would come to feel knitted into my community as a consequence of being alone, how much more I have a sense of place, belonging and acceptance within it. Nor, I think, did I anticipate how very precious I would find a small child telling me their name and their business; nor how much love I would come to feel for a beech tree; nor how my daughter’s voice and kindness and the ways in which she demonstrates her love and understanding, fills my heart with the most tender gratitude.
And I did not anticipate – and I think this belongs to another blog in its own right – that grief when attended to and followed, would be a portal into a fuller version of myself, one I can respect, have compassion for and even, little by little come to love.
That does not mean the path has been easy – it hasn’t. Nor does it mean I’m now at a rainbow’s end- I’m not. What it does mean is that it’s possible for both grief and gratitude, pain and joy to coexist. It’s nuanced, paradoxical, multi-coloured, and unpredictable. And in the end the one thing I know is that love – however we experience that – trumps everything.
With my love
Nickie
PS Thank you so much to the many of you who have written to me following on from my request last time for your input about how you might like this blog to develop.
Firstly, thank you to Ros for her poem which has given rise to this edition.
And secondly there seems to be energy for a drop in writing session where we can write together around a theme (or write alone around the same theme). My intention is, beginning in October, to hold a session on the first Monday of the month between 12 and 1. I will need to know by 10am that morning who is planning to drop in so that I can send out a link, but I can figure out the logistics nearer the time. For now, if you’re interested, just earmark the first Mondays and whoever comes comes – 2 of us, 10 of us, 20 of us, it really is all good.
Meanwhile of course, you are more than welcome, as some of you have already, to send me poems, snippets, essays or ideas. Please keep it personal to you and your specific experiences and insights. I may not be able to publish everything but nothing you send me will be wasted. All of it nourishes me, and assimilated, will return to you in some form. You can send it here or message me and ask me for my email address.
A big, big, grateful thank you to everyone.
BUY ME A COFFEE
I have been writing this blog for 3 1/2 years now and for the last couple of years many of you have gifted me through Buy Me a Coffee. I felt shy to ask you initially, but I cannot tell you how much it warms my heart to have £5 drop in here and another £5 or £10 there. You don’t pay me for my writing, you gift me for what I offer and to me it feels as if our shared currency is love. Thank you so much. I am open to receive your love any time you feel like sharing it! www.buymeacoffee.com/nickieaven