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.