On Grief

What I am learning about grief is how helpful it is to have a practice or a ritual that you do regularly that gives space for feeling into the loss. Grief has a way, I am finding, of sitting quietly in the background, simmering on the stove, upsetting equilibrium in subtle ways. For example, I have had a cold that comes and goes, comes and goes. This has been six weeks now. When I touch in on it I feel a longing for love.

Today is Mother’s Day and so I, aware from yesterday that something is brewing inside, and wrote my mother a letter. I have been writing to her since just before she died at the end of 2018. At first daily, then weekly, then more sporadically. Today, I was only two sentences in, when I was torn open by sobs. “Oh,” I thought, “This is what is sitting here, what has been tapping on the door of my soul.”

I wrote about how much I miss our phone conversations. We used to talk at least three times a week, sometimes every day. The comfort of a shared history, the way there was so much that never needed to be said to be understood – like a foundation and rooms already built in our conversation. We had a similarity of views and there was always a richness in the meaty issues we would explore together. And here was a woman who thought I was wonderful (not every minute of every day, but as a human being), she delighted in me, she was so proud of the work that I do, so in awe of it. She loved me and I felt like all of me was always there, nothing had to be held back or hidden, and even what was held separate I knew she knew (whether I wanted her to or not). And I never feared that she might one day stop loving me.

This is not to say that our relationship was easy. In fact it was only as I was driving to the hospice, hoping I would make it in time to see her before she slipped into unconsciousness, that I found a way to make peace (or the most peace I had ever been able to make) and a peace I could offer her: “Thank you for everything.”

It is true. From the simplest fact that without her I would not be here, to the meals and clothes and lessons she helped me learn, to the intensity of the grief and the trauma her leaving left with me when she left for Australia when I was 7 years old and too young to understand, when I was left with a father who did not have the emotional strength to cope with her going and I was largely alone with my fear and loss. I can thank her for the wild ride of going to an aboriginal community at age 8, which was not well-held by her and yet has also given a richness to my life that I could have acquired no other way. There are also the books and the deep conversations on philosophy and culture had over the dinner table which I carry with me as lining in the coat of my life, along with the struggles to throw off the robe of needing to be like ‘the rest of them’ – an academic.

Nothing in life comes pure and clear to us, I sense. Always there is the weaving and the picking apart, the donning and the taking off, the gratitude and the frustration. I wonder why we expect so much of our parents, when they have given us the gift of life and have raised us well enough to reach adulthood? I wonder whey we assume that they owe us more? Or why I did? I know that pieces were missing that would have helped me be stronger as I entered adulthood. But beyond that perhaps it is more because we have lost so much of our connection with community. I do believe it takes a village and we have placed all the responsibility on one or two poor souls who are also trying to earn a living and study and cook and clean and maintain friendships and keep their heads above water. And perhaps because we have lost or given away the ingrained sense of the divine belonging and kinship with all beings on earth and family is all. Perhaps because a belief has arrived that ‘we deserve’, and what we deserve is the fulfilment of the myth of the perfect childhood: complete with 1950s appliances and cookies and milk after school.

We are alive! We are part of this world! We are subject to its dangers and its joys. We are deeply connected whether we know it or feel it – or not. And when a thread of that connection is broken or frayed or changes we feel it maybe as deeply as our soul and our bones. And so there is grief. Whether it is the loss of a mother or father or friend, bushfires that tear through the forests and char millions of our fellow, beloved wombats and wallabies, potteroos and hopping mice, or a virus that sweeps through our population taking people with a ferocity that evokes terror like an earthquake – we feel grief. Something has changed, something is lost. Eden is gone.

For me the fires heralded a feeling that ‘life will never be the same again’. Here is this planet and here is this city that could run out of water and become a desert, and I am implicated, I am part of this death and a creator of the dying. The novel coronavirus is another death: that in-your-faceness of potential imminent dying of the kind that is acute and pain-filled, that awareness that illness and death belong to all of us and come from the earth that also nourishes and cares for us.

All of these griefs – mother, fire, illness – can live in my life like a mud pool, quietly bubbling up its stories and feelings, whispering through the night and day of what is gone, what may never be replaced, what, what, what, until my body feels heavy and beleaguered, my work too hard, life without charm or sunlight no matter how bright the day, how sparkling the frost on the grass.

To have practices that make me pause and listen, give a clear outlet for the voice that might not know how to speak during a work day or even a quiet Sunday at home, these help me touch in on what it means to be alive, today, here, with loss and the presence of the crow flying low over the rooftops, here with past love still warm and remembered in my belly and my back, and the delight in my friend’s voice when we talk of our wins at work, as we unpick the knots of some puzzle of living.

One thing I learned early on about grief was that for me it was like a landscape. An ever-changing, curious place, like being in a foreign land, that I could never anticipate. It was a place deep inside myself that I was always walking through even as daily life went on as normal. Over time some of its features have become more recognisable, and yet there are always the surprises, just over the next hill, just down another layer into the earth of it. Today it was a castle appearing with its drawbridge poised, just waiting for me to pick up my pen to lower its wooden planks across the waters of everyday living and invite me in.