A memoir on grief
It’s been a hard grief week. They don’t happen with the frequency that they used to, but this week, oh my, this week has been a tricky one. Life has dished out challenges left, right and centre, and when your emotional and physical resilience is low, it leaves a big opening for the slithers of pain to take a hold. This blog post is from journalling I did a small while ago when processing the passing of my grumpy, beautiful, mischievous much missed dad. It was my privilege and my pain to be with him as he passed. The picture is a rose, his favourite flower, he tended his rose garden with such a dedicated heart (he was no gardener, it was huge). And a rose is a traditional flower, and my dad was traditional in every sense of the word. Goodness knows how he contended with a child like me, but contend he did. This wee post of mine helped me make a little more sense of things when they felt senseless. Writing has always been my catharsis, and at times my nemesis, although the benefit is often a moot point, as the need to write outweighs whatever it is that comes from the page.
Memoir
Nobody can tell you how you are going to feel, not even me in my deep lived life enshrouded by grief.
Everyday is a little different. At the beginning, your days all feel interminable and yet mundane and irrelevant all at the same time.
Kindness comes from the most unexpected places. Compassion is deep and honest and true. Tenderness and love gently enter into your world softly and tentatively. Sometimes you can actually feel it. But I promise you, you will be soothed and grateful, even if that takes time to be felt in your bones.
Cruelty is more prolific than you’d expect. Deliberate? Not so much. Avoidant? Possibly. Your stalwarts you discover are just humans after all and their inability to sit with you in your darkest void leaves a scar on your soul. And yet? And yet. Your rational, logical brain will know we are all doing the best with what we have – or at least you hope so. Your feeling brain feels abandoned in your darkest hour with no manner of amelioration or rationalisation of help. It burns deeply.
And beyond all that? You just miss your human who has gone with every ounce of your being. And no matter how many times you hear how they’ll never truly leave your heart – fuck sake. Of course you’ll hold them and their essence in your heart, but your lived life? Your living life? They’re no longer there.
Some days you’ll be grand, until you remember that they’ve gone. Some days you are grand and you do remember they’ve gone. Some days you think you’re doing OK, sort of, then an absent memory, thought or chat brings on waves of grief that engulf your being. Some days you just need to hunker down and put one unsteady foot in front of the other. The tears eventually slow their torrent and powers to engorge the flame of your being. The odd one escapes and can roll down your cheek rather than have your whole body contorted in the stricken of grief.
But know that this too will ease, for it will not pass. It will soften and it will ease. The biggest support you can have is from yourself. From a space of gentle tenderness and permission to grieve.
Nobody can tell you how you are going to feel, not even me in my deep lived life enshrouded by grief.
Immortality by Clare Harner (1934)
I read this beautiful poem, Immortality by Clare Horner, at the end of my celebration talk about my Dad.
with love,
