Category: grief

Oh. That’s just what I was thinking.

So I was at the newsagent to buy a 2 ring binder to replace the 3 ring binder which, when I bought it, I was sure was a 2 ring binder, but anyhoo and moving on, at the newsagent, I saw Caroline Jones’ book, through a glass darkly: a journey of love and grief with my father and I bought it.

Even though I was on the way to the bottle shop to buy (yet) another bottle of Langhorne Creek Bernoota (cannot recommend it highly enough) for the purchase of which I did not need to seek my husband’s permission, I sat in the carpark and opened the book and there, in the introduction, I read this:

“I was unprepared for my own grief and for the extent to which it disabled me….the main quality of my condition was uncertainty. It was difficult to make decisions. I found it hard to know what mattered. My sense of meaning was shaken and I was unclear about my purpose. I put on a good face and I made myself do everything as usual, but my heart wasn’t in it. I felt very sad most of the time and sometimes I was angry. What most people talked about seemed very trivial. I felt that I was behind a pane of glass on the other side of which people’s lives went on. But I was not part of that life.

I now have come to think of grief as a sort of severe illness, bordering at times on derangement; an illness that dislocated me physically, mentally, psychologically and spiritually…

…Suffering, loss and grief are facts of life for everyone, although I am sure some people accept the death of a parent as a sad event but one which is acceptable in the order of things. While they may feel sorrow, they soon resume the business of their lives without suffering any deep trauma. People who experience a parent’s death in this philosophical manner would, almost certainly, find this book a puzzling over-reaction to a natural life event.”

Having read most of the book in the six hours since then, I agree that many people might find this book an over-reaction. But for myself? I say, Caroline Jones, I will never be able to thank you enough.

Every cloud and so on

I’ve had an interesting realisation this afternoon. Another sign that I am moving on, that my life is no longer dominated by my grief.

A blergh thing happened today, and it’s left me a little blergh. But just now I realised that this will happen. Every now and then, for as long as I live, blergh things will happen, and I will feel a little bit blergh. Nothing to do with the death of my father, nothing to do with living somewhere I don’t want to live, nothing to do with homesickness. No need for intense inner reflection and pulling myself off the couch and reminding myself one foot in front of the other and better not open another bottle of wine.

A blergh thing happened, and now I feel blergh because that’s what life is like. Not all the time, but every now and then.

And I can’t tell you how good it feels to be feeling a little blergh.

Look back on anger

The football being persisently unavailable on the television, the mister and I began discussing me. More particularly, we began discussing me and the progress of my manuscript.

On my part, I was trying to understand why I have so little to show for all that time when I had not much to do but write, and now, all of a sudden, when I have just an hour or so a day things are coming together.

On his part, he couldn’t suggest a better topic of conversation so had to run with mine.

I was sort of moaning about having to go back to work this morning (our weekend is Friday and Saturday and for obvious reasons, we don’t get an Easter long weekend). More precisely, I was moaning that my writing time was already at an end. Why did I not have this drive and momentum last year when the only thing I had to do with my time was write?

The mister was very good about not rolling his eyes, although he let it be known that the conversation was only allowed to take a limited amount of his remaining weekend.

The coincidence of my gaining a job and writing momentum at the same time is not wholly inexplicable. For one thing, having a job has given me a structure that I did not have before. The mister thinks I have created an environment of ‘urgency’. Knowing the time is limited means I do not waste the time (though it does not completely wipe away the question of whether I can possibly work full time and finish a manuscript – the answer to that question is still some time away). For another, having a job has made me feel better about myself and I’m less inclined to flop on the couch feeling directionless and otherwise woe-is-me.

And, on top of everything else, I think maybe I was just not ready to write. Last year, I did manage to get the wordcount on my manuscript up pretty high – very high indeed – but the moment, I am enjoying putting red lines through a great number of those words because my, there are some angry bitter words in there.

There is a greater sense of calm this year. Not only in my words, but in the act of writing itself. I am writing with focus and direction and a sense of purpose that has nothing to do with being right or wronged.

This is not to say that I will take all of the anger out, nor is to pretend that all was rosy in my fair land. Only that I am enjoying writing about being angry, knowing that I’m not.

Looking back on anger is a most lightening feeling indeed.

One year down, one to go

I took the lads back to Berri (the mister’s home turf) via Adelaide for Christmas while the mister stayed here Abu Dhabi.

Landing in Australia, putting credit back on my Australian SIM card, I felt the relief that you feel on arriving somewhere that takes no real effort. The relief that comes from knowing the language, the laws, and what to do if you lose your purse. We could get sick, robbed, lost, but it would be okay and, anyway, we wouldn’t get sick or robbed or lost, because we were home.

Except I was a little bit lost.

Well of course I was.

I’d just taken my lads to Paris for what must surely be, even if I am only half way through it, one of my life’s highlights. I’d dropped in at Abu Dhabi just long enough to remember how incomprehensible it is; to have a farewell coffee with a wonderful friend who won’t be here when I get back; and for the mister to wash my knickers and shove them back into my suitcase not-quite-dry. Then I pulled my clot-preventing socks back up and collected my boarding pass.

Back in Adelaide, I found, as people always do when they return, that everything was all at once different and the same. The light and the smells and the sound hit me with their forgotten familiarity. The air was dry, no crane in sight. But our house is rented out; we wouldn’t be spending the Christmas-New Year break on Kangaroo Island; the people who bought my Grandfather’s house have knocked it down and built a new one in its place; and a few days after I arrived in Adelaide the sale of my Dad’s – our family – house was settled. Dusted and done.

I was home, but not.

Mostly though, I was lost, because this was the second Christmas after Dad’s death. The second Christmas of being parent-less.

I think that in the grieving cycle, seconds are a bit more complex than firsts. Maybe not for everyone, but for me. In the second year, it all becomes real. In the second year, the shock has worn off and the protective numbness is receding. In the second year, that loss has been layered by births, illnesses, marriages, break-ups, break-downs, deaths, graduations, birthdays, bushfires, redundancies. Life has gone on as it does, layering our experiences minute by minute, days at a time. And so, at the second Christmas, you look around and you realise that this is how it is. He’s gone.

Intellectually, I know that I am a middle-aged woman without parents. I know this. But emotionally, I’ve lost my bearings, and I’m still not quite sure where I fit in this post-parent age. Even physically, I have to adjust, because my body still feels the absence of my parents as an emptiness above and around me. Somehow or other I have to work out how I can grow into that space.

As much as I try to keep Christmas low-key, it as at Christmas time that absences loom large. I do have places to be and people to be there with. Other families, of which I am a part, love me, welcome and care for me. Really, it’s quite something and even just thinking about how beautiful people were to me, I cry. But the absences are still there.

I’ve got welcoming places, but I haven’t got parents. I have safe harbours, but my anchors are lost.

Still, however lost I did feel, however overwhelmed, I was always glad that I’d made the trip. I watched the lads play with their cousins and have sleepovers and trade pokemon cards and go for swims in the river. I sat in backyards and in cafes and on the beach with my aunties, uncles, my step-family, my in-laws, my cousins, my friends.

I drank too much and stayed up way past my bedtime every single night (one time, almost til dawn, and it wasn’t even New Year’s Eve – brilliant times). One of the things I especially liked was sitting with my cousins and my friends, the ones who are around the same age, people I’ve known a long time or through tricky times, all of us who have looked, or are looking, around and thinking, ‘my goodness, look where we are, how did this happen and what are we supposed to do now?’

We cried and laughed over the years we’ve just had and the decisions we’ve made and the things that have turned out right and the things that have turned out wrong and the things we’re glad we’ve done and the things we should-oughtta have done. I wallowed, then get over myself, then wallowed, then get over myself again.

And it’s interesting, that even as each conversation acted like a little anchor, each one adding to the other, giving me more and more steadying weight, I felt myself able to leave them again, able to return to this incomprehensible place and say to the mister, ‘We should go and buy a bougainvillea to plant in the courtyard this weekend.’