What was I thinking?
What was I thinking? I should have known that to write something like, “adjustment to loss seems to be establishing itself” was inviting trouble. And so it transpired. Grief has bitten me on the bottom. Loneliness has taken up a larger residency within me.
Tears are close to the surface but rarely fall, though maybe on a walk, when its raining and the river is wildly thrashing the overhanging trees and together the wind and rain have upended shallow rooted trees, creating an obstacle course over and under which the dog can jump and crawl but which snags me at every turn.
Messy
How many times have I written in these pages, “grief isn’t pretty”? How many times have I encouraged others to allow messiness, admit to taboo feelings? Can I extend to myself the same understanding and generosity?
Awake last night for some hours, I knocked the photograph I have of my beloved man beside my bed, to the floor.
“Stay there!” I said to him in my head. “You deserve it.” Writing that hurts. But this was how it was at 2 in the morning. Why did he leave me alone when we had both finally found love, when we had so much we wanted to offer the world together, when we had a home of our own at last, when my son had just died? NOT FAIR, I want to shout. Surely someone must be to blame, as if that would make it better. Surely he had a hand in his own demise, in devising his own life plan.
Weary
Acceptance, Elizabeth Kubla Ross posited, is the final stage of grief but, like all the other stages, it comes and goes, does a turn around the dance floor, tantalises with its hope of equanimity and then disappears, elusive, as if it had never been.
The truth is I am weary of body and spirit. I’ve been working hard – all good but long hours and not enough care for myself in the mix. I need to rest and I need to replenish. I need someone to make me a cup of tea, or, as Hafiz promises, to “bring [me] trays of food”. Yes please. And, he says, “You can use my soft words/as a cushion for your/head”. I could have done with those soft words for my head as I tossed and turned last night.
I need to have someone at my back. The beech tree does its best but I don’t understand beech language so well. I need the very thing I grieve for, I long for. Longing. Here it is: longing… belonging.
Longing
I envisage longing like a long road. What is at the end, at the point where the road and the horizon meet? In my imagination it is my man. And yet, this longing feels holy. It is the fundamental longing of a human heart, calling out to be met, to belong. The fact that it was, in my life, more nearly met by a certain man puts him at the point, but I do know that the longing is more innate than that. It feels, if I may use the word, ineffable.
It is as if I practised vulnerability, practised opening to the possibility that I could feel love without conditions – both the giving and receiving of it – with this other human being. In his absence I feel lost. But I’m praying, not to him but to Whatever it is that puts the longing inside our hearts.
“Find me. Meet me. Never let Love be an unknown to me.”
Is Anything listening?
The last words go to Hafiz:
“Something missing in my heart tonight Has made my eyes so soft My voice So tender, My need of God Absolutely Clear."
May Love be with you,
Nickie
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