There are times in which we connect sights and sounds, even smells, with the memory of people and events. For me, the taste of grapefruit juice will always hold an association with hospital stays for me. Certain songs can transport me to cheesy pop at the QMU, Sparkles at the beach ballroom, sweeping up popcorn in screens at Cineworld, or the tune playing in the background during a break up in a candlelit café.
What I have not yet encountered is the linking of two unrelated events. Yet somehow, I inexplicably associate the breaking of my wrist last summer with the death of my mother. I don’t of course mean to suggest one caused the other, but it inevitably remains that these two separate and entirely unrelated events have become chapters in a greater personal story of loss and grief.
Perhaps it is the scar I can still see and feel which triggers the memory of her, of the long wait for the operation, over 12 hours in total without food or drink due to unexpected emergencies. Throughout my hours of wooziness, mum sat with me, sneaking sweets and small bites herself when she hoped I wasn’t looking.
Perhaps it is the fact it still inflicts a gnawing, aching pain even now, and is nowhere near returned to its former strength. Perhaps this is just the correlation I have made in my mind between the physical and emotional nature of my own pain.
In truth, however, the crux of the matter started earlier than that, at least two weeks earlier. For someone who had never before broken any bones, and then to break my ‘wrong wrist’ it shook my fiercely independent world. It was my first acute feeling of helplessness for quite some time, needing others to assist me in the smallest of tasks. I struggled so much with trying to tie my hair back for instance, felt so affronted to ask others to do it for me, that I went to the hairdresser to get it cut short the next week. I still keep it short (out of sheer stubbornness, perhaps, that I should be put in that situation again).
I had to ask my mum to wash my hair for me, which was beyond ridiculous to me at the time. Little did I know that just over three months later I would have wanted nothing more in all the world.
Helplessness arrests us and shakes us to the very rawness of our own fragility. I realise how easy it is to cover it over with some flimsy layers of bravado. In Dutch there is a great expression, ‘ik liep tegen mezelf aan’, and between the physical to the emotional breaking, I clashed with myself and my own expectations, and I still do.
And in times of helplessness, we yearn for one thing. Aside from the one thing which won’t come back to us, we yearn for hope in better days, for signs of improvement, however small, that could make each present day more bearable for the next. We hope for healing.
I wonder, sometimes, of our perceptions of healing though. They can too often be portrayed as all consuming singular events where everything suddenly falls into place. A hollywood style instant miracle where all pain and the memory of it is waved away with the sweep of a hand. Crudely put I realise, but in our world of airbrushing and instant satisfaction, I have come to redefine what I thought healing could mean. Healing does not wipe the slate clean and is certainly not ready-made for the taking.
Healing leaves scars of its own.
Battle wounds which, however invisible to others represent an unforgotten struggle, all the while signally its own words of comfort, until before you are fully aware of it you are a year further. Whether you are better or worse is not the question you are able to answer, all you can say with any certainty is that the scar you bear has lost some of its garish colour and if you are not mistaken, feels ever so slightly softer than it did yesterday.
Rx
“Our dreams of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.”
– Gilead, Marilynne Robinson –
Dutchblend 