I’ve been doing ok. Doing the stuff, you know. Even feeling happy. But here’s the thing with grief. It’s like a hollowness inside your body. I feel mine where the searing pain used to be, right under my solar plexus. It never leaves, never changes. It’s just evolved from this debilitating agony that would have me wondering how I would even stand up each day into this hole. An emptiness. A black hole of sadness. I’ve read that grief is love that has no where to go anymore which is heart breaking in itself really. I love my Mum, location doesn’t really have any change on that but I guess now it’s robed in the exquisite pain of missing absolutely everything that she was. This new painful love has now resided in my lower chest. Wow, cheery.
So I’ve learned to live with hollow. The first part of my movie ended the day she died. The person I was disappeared. The sequel that’s now showing features a much changed lead female, stronger, yes, through no choice of her own, definitely greyer with a bit missing. A circle of something cut out of my middle. And most days it’s fine. I’m numb. I guess you have a choice when you go through massive trauma, roll over and let it consume you completely or get on with it. Feel it, puke it, hit it, scream at it and eventually walk next to it. I chose to walk. But the bastard keeps sticking out it’s leg and tripping me up.
Down I fall into the sadness all over again. And here I am at the moment. The triggers are invisible sometimes. The drip drip effect of seeing others on date nights as the grandparents have the children or happy shopping trip photos of daughters with their Mums. I don’t mean to sound bitter, I’m happy for the people who still have it but I’m so angry at the universe for taking her. I long to pop in for coffee with my babies, see her face light up at the sight of their smiles. To pick up the phone to run over our days, the inconsequentials being so important to her as it’s about me. Moaning to her about my marriage or financial worries and hearing her words calm me instantly like a safe harbour in a storm. Yet that won’t happen, I know, she’s dead. Writing those words stings every nerve in my body and quickens my breath even two years on. And the weirdest thing I’ve discovered lately is that I like the sting.
Now this may sound odd but hear (or read) me out. Death has been close lately. Someone we knew died. And the memories and the pain and the remembering has been breathtaking but strangely familiar. I’ve gone back to places in my mind and stayed there a little longer than I usually do. To feel the pain, to relive the horror. It’s taken me closer to a time she was alive. A time closer to when I last spoke to her. A time where I saw her face, kissed her, told her how much I loved her. I have wanted to let out cries. Those whole body ones that come out like an animal instinct, the sounds I made in the days after she was gone. I want to scream and cry and cry and open her wardrobe to all of her clothes that still smell like her and bury my face in them as if that would take me closer to touching her again. Because the pain makes it real. The pain replaces the numb and I can feel it and see her and it’s only just happened so she’s not been gone that long. I would still live in a cotton wool world where everyone makes everything gentle and as soft as possible to help cushion the pain and round off the edges.
Of course I don’t want to live there permanently, that would be very depressing and would turn me into a dreadful bore. But when months pass and you learn to live this life, holding hands with your new sorrowful friend, pressing on the wound feels needed. I remind myself of why I feel so sad. That it’s ok to feel so sad. And angry. And left behind. And without my Mum. Because I am.
I was going to stop writing there but I realise how dark an end that would’ve been. You see I am ok. I am doing the stuff and I am happy. I’m just grieving. X
Mueve Mummy 