Hope is the anthem

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 –

And the world spins madly on*

None of us have the monopoly on grief, but when it comes, it has a way of piercing through and isolating you in your own bubble. A tailor-made experience that has been designed to effect you to your very core.

Loss, sorrow, missing someone are all incompatible and irreconcilable with the reality of the emptiness which grief brings. You are thrown into the very heart of it, and you have no choice. No choice but to live on in what can only be, what must be, some cruel parallel universe.

A world with no 6pm call to check a recipe,

no dinner table talk of the weeks happenings,

no sharing of books read,

no asking of ‘favours’,

no career advice,

no boyfriend vetting,

no mother of the bride,

no 50th wedding anniversary,

no baby time with gran.

Lost memories, both lived and unlived all suddenly, somehow, voided.

It is a battle of realities, an inundation of memories past and imagined. One reality with its own intermingling of the ghosts of past, present and yet to come. Where the other reality plods on tirelessly in tow.

In Dutch you would wish someone ‘sterkte’, a compassionate expression recognising that difficult times are ahead, and an extra dose of ‘strength’ will come in handy. It’s a term with no direct English translation, and one I have always admired, but it has got me thinking about our understanding of strength.

I will fully admit I am generally someone who likes to be in control of their emotions. I do not like to ‘slip’ in this regard, and I even pride myself that few will have seen me in tears (God forbid!), and if they have, could count these moments on one hand. It is both ironic and poignant then that, in my case, my grief experience, has included an influx of overwhelming and unrelenting waves of emotion. If I was worried before of shedding a tear in front of a close friend, I now have to check and subdue myself in a train full of people, at the cash register in a shop, on the street, behind my desk at work…the list continues.

As I adjust to this element of my new reality, I realise the ridiculous things we view as ‘strong’, things which hold up ever so well, that is until they don’t. I can be strong with full bravado in the eyes of the world, but true strength is also allowing yourself to be weak, vulnerable, lacking in control and utterly exposed to the elements. I also recognise this is much easier to say than to put into practice.

Strength inverted, strength as weakness, clashes with so many of our ideologies. Weakness is not glamorous, not ‘appropriate’, will not impress well on others, is too often misunderstood and misinterpreted. Yet it opens doors in a way a show of strength never will. No matter how much I am loathe to succumb to it, I am never more spiritual, more humble, or more connected to others than when I am vulnerable and ‘weak’.

In this Easter weekend just passed then, as we remember the pain, humiliation and sacrifice of good Friday, the bitter mixed with the sweet of Easter Sunday to follow and its celebration of joy, relief and praise. It reminds me to embrace the fragile, uncomfortable and painful rather than push it aside. Slowly but necessarily taking steps in another direction, towards a new strength, full of brokenness, full of humility, full of grace.

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

– Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms –

*The Weepies, ‘World spins madly on’

Rx

My tribute to an incredible woman

Today, International Women’s Day, is when people across the world celebrate powerful female role models, and it seemed most fitting to share a tribute of my own. To the woman who made me in great part the person I am today, these are the words I prepared for my mum’s thanksgiving service almost 5 months ago.

Mum held together many surprising contradictions. A believer of ghosts and haunted houses alongside an unwavering belief in the power of faith and prayer.

She had a growing collection of degrees and qualifications, but was somehow unable to find her way back to the car on a Sunday morning.

A fiercely passionate woman who spoke her mind, even more so with a glass of wine in hand. Yet also humbled by the words in a great classic novel.

She was a testament to the idea that no one career or illness need define you.

Despite her notoriously bad sense of direction, she had a way of inspiring and navigating others well through life.

Mum would say, ‘I’m nothing special’. ‘Its not about me’. She was baffled by the impression she left on others, unaware of her ability to connect at an extraordinary level with those around her.

In some way or another, she has left her imprint on all of us.

She was in tune with people. She had a way of feeling their pain and sadness, their internal struggles, their potential. All of this making that unexpected phone call, that thoughtful card or unannounced visit come at a time they needed it most. Even in her hospital bed she was asking after friends and family, taking note of those she should extend some extra attention to.

Mum took on so many different roles. To me she was mother, teacher, student, friend, coach and counsellor and the list could go on.

She would often joke ‘you’ll miss me when I’m gone’. And nothing could feel more true.

For the wisdom you shared, for the strength you passed on, for the memories we will cherish, I have only one prayer.

May you still guide us now you’re gone, mum, may you still guide me now you’re gone.

Rx