It’s only been a month, but I’m struggling to remember any of the silly sheep jokes Tony, my stepdad, told. And there was at least one a day. I do remember they were along the lines of ‘Where do sheep get their hair cut? At the baa-ber.’
Now I wish I’d kept a little notebook of his jokes. Recorded them somehow.
Life can be so flimsy.
One minute, I’m standing in the driveway, hands full of groceries, a hungry kid fresh home from school, emails to be checked, washing to be hung, trying to edge away from where Tony has emerged from our granny flatlet to recount the latest development in the Russian/Ukrainian war. (Because, although I loved his sheep jokes, I found it a challenge to fully appreciate his inquiring political mind filled with dates and facts.)
The next minute, the bench where he used to sit in the afternoon sun, book open on his lap, is empty. He is - unbelievably - no longer here.
How do we make sense of death? How do we keep showing up in our lives, in spite of or alongside the outlandish losses we have all / will all face? The outrageous fact of life is that none of us gets out of here alive. And the further down the track of life I walk, the more it seems the roadside is littered with those who have fallen.
‘Everybody knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it…’ Morrie Schwartz says in Tuesdays with Morrie, the bestselling memoir by Mitch Albom.
And when there is a strong love connection between hearts, this dying business is doubly outrageous. Not only is it outrageous that this person has gone, dropped off the face of the earth but it is doubly so because we are terribly constrained by the physical plane. Once our loved one has crossed over to the other side (wherever that is), it is impossible to communicate in the way that we so desperately want to, across this vast gap.
In the past month since Tony has passed away, I am learning two things.
The first one is about grief. I’m learning that it’s not an active process but rather, something we are called to submit to, surrender ourselves to. And yet, although ‘surrendering’ sounds passive, it is hard, hard work. And utterly exhausting.
Isn't that odd? It’s like constantly wading through a powerful undertow that pulls and tugs at you. Whether you’re making tea or watching TV, most of you is doing the work of struggling in this perpetual, relentless current, treading water, your calf muscles burning and your breath pulling through your lungs.
It’s like having one foot in the other world, a world of spirit and energy and feeling, which leaves you constantly off balance.
As my mother describes it, the early stages of grief are like having an open wound that just won’t grow a scab, it’s always raw and bleeding.
And not only is there the aching and impossible loss of the one you loved, but also the loss of the world as you knew it. When your world has been torn apart by death, it will never be the same. You will always feel somehow off kilter, with part of you standing in the other world.
And part of the work of grieving, part of why it’s so bone-achingly exhausting, is that your relationship with your loved one is a work in progress. There’s a kind of renovation, a renegotiation of the relationship that gets underway when that person is ripped off the face of the earth.
The connection and the relating don’t just stop when the person’s body comes to an end. There’s a massive renegotiation that begins. Even though the person is no longer there, the one who is left is still ‘in relation’ to the departed one. She is still always loving, thinking, remembering, missing, regretting, talking, crying, remonstrating, shifting, forgetting.
So subconsciously there’s a huge amount of labour going on as our minds struggle to make some sense of this unfamiliar emptiness, as our hearts work to get to grips with the loss.
Like a potter toiling away, who kneads and wedges the clay, cradles it in her hands, rolls it out, pats it before she can shape something from it.
And in the midst of this renegotiation, we search for some sense of reciprocation. Whether it’s through our dreams, images or the signs we come across - we are constantly searching for some kind of connection, for the sense that what used to be a thriving two-way street, with a call-and-response, give and take, push and pull, still somehow exists. That there is still someone on the other end.
The second thing I am (re)learning is that everyone we meet has experienced loss and its steamroller companion, grief. Every one of us has had to somehow keep living in the face of immeasurable losses.
And our grief needs space and silence. It needs a quiet, dimly lit room, slow conversations with lots of listening, a warm hand, steaming cups of tea, a soft blanket. Yet the world around us seems to contain only brightly lit rooms, filled with constant noise and chatter, in which silence is uncomfortable and avoided.
So we need to build our own room for grief. Because I have the sense that it’s very important work, an essential part of living fully in this world.
And if we accept the work, it’s a desperately hard but strong teaching that invites us to stand more fully on the earth, even if we’re a little off balance. It shows us that our hearts can hold so much. And that they can let go of even more.
Oh, Cath. This so deeply felt, so beautifully expressed. It just feels wrong that there is no response when we call to those who have gone. Doesn't stop the conversation from this side happening, though. Which is a good way of sifting through all the messy emotions left in the wake of death.
Yes, this spiral way of coming to terms with loss has been my great undoing and yet I am so grateful for what it has taught me. Thank you for writing about it so beautifully and truthfully.