Kind of a year in, on good days when lots is going on, it kind of feels like:

I lost something big, or small, something crucial, but I can't remember what or when or how.
And importantly, like I don't know how to get it back.

Or:
Like my tummy is empty, but no, it's not my tummy, and it's not food that'll fill it.

So:
Empty, and lost, still.

Maybe I always felt this way, but now I have a good excuse.

Letter to my Father

Dear Papa

I miss you.

It's Mum's birthday today, and I'm away in England.

I'm writing this on my office table.  The one I was sitting at when we talked for the last time on the phone.   We've changed the room now so the table doesn't look out of the window.  It now faces the wall, so the window is behind us.  It was too glare-y the other way.

The Man and I sit together at the table when I work at home.  It's cramped, but cozy and I love being near him.

My book is still not out, nor my paper.  I'm still working on both though.

Winter is turning into spring. The small cherry (or almond?) tree in the town center is always the first to burst into bloom every year, and this week, it has.  The moon is a hazy smile, waxing in a dark blue sky.

I think of you so much off late.  I wonder if you can hear me, if you can hear me calling you in my heart. Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night, shortly after falling asleep.  I thought: If I fall asleep at once, Papa will come to me.
Then I shrugged it off and turned around and couldn't fall asleep and I guess that was the end of that.
Are you trying to reach me, Papa?
I'm trying to reach you.

Can you hear me?

I love you so much.

Me.

Flatline

Months and months of just nothing much.
Tasks and lists, and getting the veg bag every week and wondering about deadlines. Will I get that job, will I want it if I got it? Boredom. A movie, coffees out. Plane ride home, plane ride back.
On and on, round and round the mulberry bush.
Straight face, flatlining.
That's what grief does.
It does not wail, or scream, or howl or screech. That's life, that's awakening, birthing, bleeding. Those    Things screech and howl.
Grief is the empty nothing that has nothing to tell.

EXPRESS YOURSELF!!! our culture shouts.
LET IT OUT!!!!

But grief cannot be 'expressed', or 'let out'.
It just is. A quiet, enormous, aching flatline. And rather boring, actually. 

Deep Freeze

For the first time since my arrival in England 7 years ago, I find myself aching for winter. The cold, the blankness, the silence. Trees asleep in white woodlands, punctuated by ravens, by the soft swish of falling snow. Deep, quiet nights. Storms. I ache for storms, and then silence.
This year, I will put my arms out of the window in the first winter storm. Then I will walk under the trees in the quiet after.
No 'winter landscape with robin', this year. Sickening. No fireside, no mugs of hot chocolate.
Come winters past, I began to dream of red scarves and fur hats and the smell of burning wood. Pine cones, and log cabins and ice-skating at the Natural History Museum in London. Fairy lights and starry nights. My friend and I would make apple pie and Christmas cookies. We'd spend evenings writing indoors, watching the mist gathering outside. Outer and inner would merge: As autumn danced on, my make-up turned copper, then brown.

This year, it is gunmetal and black. My new coat is black. My three new dresses, my hair, my new eyeshadow, my new diary, my pens.

This year, it's dark feathers and ice. Bare branches, and grey skies, and the silent, knowing winter. White, and black, and wild.

My sadness comes over me suddenly. One minute I'm asleep, the next I'm awake for no reason, disturbed and anxious. I get out of bed, make a cup of coffee. The light is changing outside. Perhaps I'll go for a walk, I say to myself.  I creep out of our bedroom, not wanting to wake the man.
But no, my body doesn't want to go for a walk. I sit on our couch, and curl up with a cup of coffee, watching the light change. The house is quiet, there's a bird chirping outside. And suddenly, it's quiet and private enough to cry.

I miss my Dad, I feel his absence, I feel my need for him, and I feel my sadness at thinking that throughout our time together, something separated us.  Something I can't explain or pinpoint. He was a great Dad. He was actively a great Dad, right up to the time he was physically unable to speak or open his eyes. He always sensed my moods and needs, struck the right balance between support and teaching me independence, was a strong, guiding presence in my life. So why, why did I feel this way so much?

I don't know. But the fact that I did - and still do - really kills me.  I wish, so very hard, that it was different. That it could still be different.

The light moves from blue to grey, the sky turns, and all of a sudden, it doesn't feel quiet enough to cry anymore. I put my coffee cup away, come upstairs, and start to work.   

Guilt is a fearsome enemy.
I used to wrestle the idea that if I am feeling guilty about something, I should simply change my actions.

But here's the thing.  I find myself now wrestling with my guilt rather than changing my actions.
It's a stubborn thing, and I sense it runs deeper and stronger than I even know.
I know that answering its every heartless call affirms my goodness and braveness and strength.  I can be guilted into being a golden child, a care-taker, a healer, a martyr.  But I am not happy, and I feel like a phony.
Of course, I love my Mum and want to help her at this time in our lives.  But my guilt whispers injunctions that go beyond 'help' and tend towards 'rescue', 'save' and 'redeem'.  It whispers that I should have thrown up my life in England and moved back to India.  It whispers that I should consider doing this.  It whispers that terrible things will happen to me if I don't - I'll lose my health, I'll regret it, I won't prosper, I'll regret it.
It's never a happy voice, beckoning towards the higher path. It's a slave-driver with a pitchfork to my back, driving me.
And that is why I feel the urge to fight it, and I think having made this distinction, I have a way forward. 

I wanted to link to this post by the beautiful Claire Bidwell Smith. 

Claire writes about her life in California with her family, and I've been following her blogs for many years. She lost her parents young, to illness, and so when I first came across her writing, I felt ... that feeling you feel when for an instant, you don't feel alone (except of course, I still have my Mother!) 

The last lines of her post made me cry. She writes (in a letter to her daughters): 

"If there’s ever a moment in your life when you’re feeling unsure of who you are, take a little journey like this one and you’re sure to remember.

I think that’s one of the bravest things you can really do in life. Remember who you are."

How beautiful, and so true. 

I think I will take a "little journey" too, very soon, and do what I ache to do - remember who I am, behind, under and above all the pain and sadness of the last few months. If there is anything left of that person, I think she will come out to say hello if I am alone, under a tree, with nothing but a landscape and the weather for company. 

Yes. I think I will :) 

It struck me today how different people's reactions to loss are.
And how, the very people you think will understand exactly what you're feeling, are sometimes the ones who are experiencing things so differently that you're unable to even communicate.
Why did I expect that we would all be able to cry together, or rail together, or derail together? My 'process' so far has followed this trajectory:
Intense fear (before my Father's death) --> Acceptance and 'care-giving' --> Intense calm --> Intense anger --> Sadness and anxiety.
My Mother's journey has been so different that we have often clashed when attempting to communicate.
We are feeling different things at any given time, and it turns out what we really believe is different too.
The reason this is a problem is that we expected things to be different. We expected that we'd both feel the same way, at the same time, for close to the same reasons. We thought we knew what the other thought about death, loss, life.
Without going into the details of it, it turns out that my Mum actually feels very differently about certain things than I do. For example, I would have thought that she believes that 'Things happen for a reason' and 'No one goes before their time'. Instead, she seems to believe that my Father went before his time. Or at least, she is intensely dissatisfied with the timing of his passing, convinced that it could have been avoided.
It turns out that I believe that my Father's time had come. Period.

I don't know how to explain the discrepancy between this belief and my belief in prayer and wishing and what not. I just know, as I explained in my last post, that I knew his time had come. I knew it in my heart. It took some time for my head to catch up. But it did.
My Mum, despite a lifetime of telling me that she thinks that everything happens at the right time for the right reasons, thinks that there was something amiss in the timing and process of my Dad's passing.

The point of all this is twofold.
First, it was surprising to me that we'd think and feel so differently. Now that I reflect on it, I see how naive the expectation was that we should think the feel the same things.
I see how that expectation has stopped us from sharing our most intense thoughts and feelings during this process. Instead, we get defensive and stony.
I see that it's okay that we feel so differently.

Second, I guess if you're going through 'something' like this, I want to say in the gentlest possible way: Other people might not get it. The people you trust most to get it, might not get it. The gap between you might be too wide to cross while you're both still trying to keep your heads above water (or ever!) Forget about that for now, I guess would be my advice. Just focus on your journey and, since I believe in wishing, I will wish that you find someone who understands and accepts what you are thinking and feeling. Even if that someone is just you, alone.

I've been thinking about what it means to make wishes about the people in our lives.
If you've been through an average adolescence, you know the feeling of willing someone to ring you.  (My sympathies; I know your pain.) Sometimes, you regret having wished things quite so hard. Would our lives be much simpler if we didn't actively wish people into our lives who later turn out to be utter shits?
Perhaps.
But perhaps we'd learn different lessons too.

Anyway I digress. The kind of wishing I refer to is the kind you first feel when you really want someone or the other to ring you. Or you want that place at College. Or that first job. You throw your soul into saying Please to the Universe. That kind of wishing dominates the life of children growing up with ill parents.
There is so little else you can really do (care-taking aside).

But I have thought this thought: We rarely know enough (about others, the world or ourselves, about what is best), to make fervent wishes that directly concern other people.

I assume that wishing works, on some level, to some degree.
And that is why I am now cautious about it.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Some very wise people have told us, over thousands of years that we have fearsome powers, that the great secret of the Universe is that it is actually amenable to our whims. That our destinies are in our control.
I buy that, to a point.

And so I wonder: Can you do more harm than good by wishing for say, other's health or longevity or presence or good fortune?
When a wish stems from anything but Absolute Unselfish Love (and who of us can summon this at will?), when it is founded in personal fears and ego attachments, is it wise to wish?

In the last days of my Father's life, I found myself unable to wish, as I had before, for his recovery. I hoped for it, of course. But I couldn't bring myself to will it. I kind of felt that he willed differently. It was difficult to accept, and the effort of doing so has cost me an amount of energy I didn't know I could expend and still keep breathing.

I thought, during those days, of the amount of prayer and sheer willing that went into the years of his illness. My Mother, my sister and I. Friends and family. Nurses and doctors who knew him. The nuns who visited him so often. Priests we hired to perform special prayers. Candles at this grotto, offerings at that temple.
Did we do it because we were terrified of losing him, or out of love? Did we do it for him, or for us?

At the end of his life, he was a shadow of the man he used to be. Nothing was pleasurable any more. There was still something of him 'there', but it was nothing compared to how it was. All we could really do was sit together and hold hands. In fact, that's all he wanted. And for the last weeks, he wasn't even conscious. There were no spoken goodbyes between my Mother and him. None for my sister or me either.
One minute he was conscious, about to be discharged from hospital. The next, he was in cardiac arrest, and he never woke up.
What did we gain from wishing so fervently for so long that he would survive one illness after the other, so that he went out slowly rather than fast?

Wondering all this, I realise, is academic. Should another loved one be diagnosed with an illness, I know I will be on my knees in front of the little 'shrine' I have at home, begging and praying. Saying please, making deals, giving reasons why recovery is a good idea (as though it were a grant proposal!)
(God forbid!)
It couldn't have been different, I realize.  And who am I to tamper with the delicate physics of it all or even wonder about it?!
But I do wonder it all the same.

I had an amazing day last Thursday.
I went on a woodland 'day out' with some amazing people who are recovering from all sorts of things - homelessness, addiction of various kinds, and one of them was recovering from an abusive relationship.  I went in the capacity as a researcher for a project I'm working on, but I got some therapeutic benefit out of it, I'm sure.
There was a campfire, and we pottered around doing woodwork, or just enjoying the woods. There was a stew bubbling over and roast potatoes. Coffee, tea or hot chocolate, and a radio playing music in the background.

It was beautiful, and for some reason, it didn't hurt. I didn't have the sharp cut of feeling, or the dull ache of numbness, that have accompanied more or less constantly over the past few months.  I could just be.
Maybe it's because I was surrounded by people who were also just being after surfacing from a low point (lasting years, not months as in my case).
Maybe it was the woods. Oak trees on all sides, ivy, ferns.
Maybe it was the little tea-light holder I made. First time I held a drill, first time I sanded down a piece of wood.

I felt calm. I stopped thinking so much about what I was feeling. I wasn't spinning, or stagnant. I was fine.

My Father claimed that one day, he simply decided that he would never cry again. And he never did.

I wonder why he told me this.
I remember him saying it. I was sitting on his lap, my head against his chest, sobbing about something I can't remember now. It was night-time. Only one lamp was on in the living room.
When he said that, I looked up at him, tears temporarily stalled. I remember him smiling at me, but it was not a smile of joy.

My heart convulses with pain when I remember his smiles, his face in pain, his face in repose, his face after he said he loved me, his face angry. His face at rest.
And however much I decide I will not cry, I find myself unable to hold my tears as they run over. 

no one is ever ready

Do you watch the White Queen?
I came across it only yesterday (I know - where have I been?)
In the space of an evening, I'd devoured all the episodes online.

There's a scene in there that grabbed my heart and clenched it hard.
As her mother lies dying, the 'White Queen', though she is Queen of England, and a mother herself,suddenly becomes childlike again. Small, vulnerable, afraid. She wants help, she wants to know what her future will be. She begs her mother to stay with her. "I'm not ready" she says, her voice breaking. Her mother smiles at her and says, "No one is ever ready."

No. One. Is. Ever. Ready.

My God. It was so good.

And it is so true. You can't be ready.  You can be readier than completely unprepared. But when it comes to losing those we love, especially a parent, no one is ever ready.
This is healing to hear. It is healing to that little forlorn child who comes upon you, out of nowhere, no matter your age, or how 'together' you are, the one who is panicked and desperate. She tries to bargain for more time saying that she isn't ready. But of course, she never will be. And actually, that's okay.

Ships in the night

A woman said:
She watched her 92 year old father die, slowly, over a week.
And it was "hell."
Seeing him die "crucified me."

(Seen in: A letter to the editor in today's Independent newspaper).

Yep.

Note to self: Others have seen what I have seen. Some others have seen worse - or much worse.
If you're out there, give me a shout. I need to see you wave your hand, even if you're just passing by. 

What do I love? And how do I know?

Are you parenting a child while going through an illness?
More power to you.  And all my prayers.  I can't imagine how difficult this must be.

Or are you an adult child who has grown up with an ill, older parent?
More power to you.  And all my prayers. I know how difficult this can be.

A tip, if you're the parent:
Don't celebrate every birthday as though it might be your last. Don't load every event with megatonnes of significance because there is a gun to your head (and by extension, your child's head).
It's exhausting.
It dilutes the happiness.
It's not actually all that exclusive, that gun: everyone has it. We forget that sometimes, in families with illness. Everyone is living with the gun. It's always loaded. So chill the fuck out. Relax, cut the cake, smile a lot, hug each other, forget the shadow.

I remember 24 birthdays (mine) when I clung to my Father - either literally or over the phone. My memory does that thing it does when I am sad or scared - it becomes super sharp, and I remember every tone of Happy Birthday darling I ever heard from him. The thing about sharp memories is that even the good ones wound you deeply. There's a reason people don't remember things so sharply. I remember smiles as I cut the cake, but also tears behind my mother's eyes. My mind remembers the smiles. My heart remembers the tears.

And while I completely agree that we need to live life 110%, I also know - really know - that there's a good reason why people seem designed to forget about that loaded gun, that sand slipping through the hourglass.
It's because we need to just be sometimes. We need to think we can live forever. We need to feel invincible a little. We need to make mistakes, waste a little time, take detours, wander. We need to remember a birthday for it's joy, not for being joyful-and-potentially-the-last. 

Despite being able to come on here every day, several times a day, and spill my guts, I'm surprisingly quiet.
Perhaps being quiet is one of the things that drives people to blog.
My writing here is stream of consciousness. I don't think of topics for posts, and I don't edit. I come on, type and leave. Which, I'm sure, is seriously abusive to you if you're reading this on a regular basis. But seriously healing for me I'd like to hope.
Because we all need to spill our guts sometimes, right?

In my 'real' life, I have fewer and fewer words, and none at all to talk about my Father, or family, or what happened.

I wish it wasn't like this, because I feel like I want to be heard.
I want to hear Yes I know. Or me too. Most of all I want to hear: You're fine. It's fine. I get it. 

Here is what I do not want to hear.
Childishly, I blame the following sentences for shutting me up over the past few months.
Things like:

He's here with you.
Be strong for you Mother.
You're the Elder one. You're in charge now. You must be strong and responsible.
He's in a better place.
If you do this, what will your Mother do? She needs you.
He sent me a sign! Yay!
Everyone goes through this.
You're very strong.
You're doing amazingly well.
You dealt with it (past tense) really well. We're all very proud of you.
I'm so proud of you.
You never complain. That's amazing.

I'm sure each of these platitudes has comforted other people in the past, because that's why they're still used. Right?
I must be an exception, because all they do to me is make me feel gagged.

Fears: 

What if I am not actually strong enough, wise enough, good enough, to live a human life (without the guidance of my Father) 

What if it's all too good to be true and, like my worst fears whispered to me, my Mother's grief makes a spectacular and overwhelming resurgence and she dies?  

What if my Father thought I was a negligent daughter?What if he meant it when he called me selfish? 

What if I am, in fact, selfish in the worst possible way, or just plain evil, for having thought the thoughts I thought, and felt the feelings I felt when he was sick? 

What if I am not capable of feeling just one pure emotion at a time - sadness unclouded by anger, relief, remorse and guilt; happiness unclouded by guilt; anger unclouded by guilt. What if I'm just damaged or broken? 

What if I get cancer - because I smoked, or because I didn't say certain things, or because I felt things I didn't let out (does blogging count? I don't think so). 

And here comes the self-involved neurosis.  8:30pm sharp, every evening.  Ugh. 

My sister and I had a long talk about who should be in the hospital room when my Father died.

I could not bear the idea that he'd be alone.  For a week, he slipped in and out of the 'edge', and we couldn't stay by his bedside 24/7. So we started taking it in turns, and I stayed as long as I could at night. 

Given his status (senior, highly respected surgeon), we were allowed special dispensation to stay in the ICU with him at night as long as we were super quiet. I sat with my cheek against his hand, drifting in and out of sleep, for as long as I could every night. People came in and out, to change his position, to administer a drug, to check his vitals. 

One night, he seemed to be coming 'to', and fighting the ventilator. 

If you haven't seen a loved one coming to and fighting his ventilator, I pray you never have to. 

If you have, I pray you can forget the sight. I pray that it is possible to forget it.  

A nurse came in and on the instruction of the presiding doctor, gave my Father a syringefull of morphine.  I sort of intuited that when you give a syringefull of morphine to someone in that condition, it is possible that their heartrate will drop, and maybe not recover.  I maintained eye contact with the nurse the whole time, and he maintained eye contact with me.  I would have given away everything that is mine to give, in that moment when my Father was struggling. Anything to make him either come to completely, or sink back quickly, anything to stop his distress.

In the event, all I had to give, I gave back with my eyes. Before the syringe was half empty, the struggling stopped and everything was calm again. Pulse 60, BP normal, oxgen saturation almost normal. 

As the nurse left the room, he squeezed my shoulder.  The room was darkened, and his face was dark, but if I see him again, in a crowd of thousands, a thousand years later, I will remember him. 

How we know

Intuition is much stronger than fear.

I knew my Father would not wake up from his last illness when, late one night, after returning from the hospital, I decided to ask a Tarot deck what the outcome of his hospital stay would be.

I drew this card.

The Three of Swords, Reversed, indicates a time in the querants' life when old pain can finally be faced and released. In very rough terms, in an upright card, the swords appear to be stuck.  They're embedded in the heart, and it bleeds tears.  In a reversed position, the swords are able to 'fall out', as it were.  I got a start when I saw that the biggest and most central sword has a snake wrapped around it.  My Father was the Chinese sign of the Snake, and 2013 is the Year of the Snake.

It's a flimsy set of signs to go on if you use the left side of your brain (and if you do, I hear you saying that it's a flimsy set of signs if you use your brain at all, period).  But I knew, immediately, that I would soon be coming up to a time - within hours or days - when that central sword would be pulled, painfully, out of my heart, and that it would bleed, and hurt, and I would rather it just stayed there, but that it would be pulled out nonetheless.

With my Father no longer alive, I can release the sword that was the fear - no, the terror - and sadness that accompanied my journey through his illness.

But I would pay, in swords through the heart, for him to be alive and here with me.  

I miss my Dad.  
I miss him.  I want to call, to hear his voice, to talk to him and feel his arms around me, to feel loved by him.

I read this post yesterday, which made me think about what it will be like many years from now.

Is this what life is like?  We never get over loss, so as one gets older, there is always a sad part in our souls?

Really?