I've had "that" phone call twice in my life. The one that starts... I dont know how to say this. I cant believe it's true... This time I was hooked up to beeping machines and on heavy meds in hospital. Death doesnt care if you are currently otherwise engaged or what you might be up to. It really does just ride in and fuck everything up. With the words "... And he's dead" my world started to fray around the edges in a way that was familiar to me and the inevitable began to play out. "He" was the father of my two gorgeous kids. We were not together but they loved him like he was half the world to them. And he was.
When our dear friend, living in another country, asked if there was anything she could do I fell into my usual story... I'm fine, it will be ok. I was handling things, this is what I do. She, in a moment of raw honesty said, "I am going quietly mad here with grief". It broke my heart and my defences. "Please come and stay with me, I need you." I did need her. She arrived the next day.
Then family and friends came from all over the world. People, given half a chance, are awesome.
They cooked, cried, hugged and unpacked boxes in the apartment I had just moved into while a funeral was arranged. They found words for our unspeakable emotions and held the space for it to all unfold. We tried to figure out what you do when the unthinkable happens.
There was some really crazy suff that requires a couple of glasses of wine to talk about but somehow having witnesses to it made it less crazy. Slightly. We muddled through. My cat ended up on Prozac. I had wine.
Mostly I can sit with pain and exercise my resilience. I have the Three of Swords tattooed on my arm, the Sorrow card. I am not afraid to be in the moment, I do not need soothing. I am not afraid of my emotions. This was the motherfucker from hell. My friend Tess called it a cluster-fuck. She's the queen of understatement.
Along the way the long distance relationship I was in did what we always knew it would... it unraveled and fell apart. Oh well.
Today, four and a half months after it all began, Tess called and asked me how it was all going. I told her all the things that were in my head. The normal, well adjusted adult things that you say when people ask.
But it is going like this:
Whiskey and cigarettes.
Ventolin and yoga.
Alternate. Breathe.
It isn't pretty and you should call before you come around.
It will get better. I think. Eventually.
Some days it feels like I'm crawling out of a plane wreck to go to work with my happy face painted on. I can't tell if I'm fooling anyone. No one asks.
I believe when we live through this stuff we can come out of it with an increased capacity for compassion, for others and for ourselves. It is amazing. I am amazed. It feels like you might die and then you live and you maybe come out of it stronger. Eventually... Not yet... I'll let you know. Even writing this makes me cry.
If you ever need a shoulder to cry on, I'm your girl. I will not shy from your pain. I am not afraid of your tears. Feel free to look me in the eye and describe your deepest fear. I have lived some of mine.
I will not judge you.
P.S from David Whyte.
HEARTBREAK is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight. Even the longest, strongest marriage has had its heart broken many times just in the act of staying together over the years.
Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colours and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete’s quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.
Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.
…If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and even perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, to see it as its own reward. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is a deeper introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something or someone who has been with us all along, asking us to be ready to let go of the way we are holding everything and everyone that comes our way, and preparation perhaps, for the last letting go of all.
From me:
Dear everyone,
of all the things I have said in the last 10 or so days, the most heartfelt has been thank you.
Thank you to the people that had the words to express what we felt and the people that listened to our pain. Thank you to the ones that came to be here and hold us close and to those that held the space over great distance. Thank you for every meal that you cooked, box that you unpacked and everytime you asked "can I help". Each time you found a way through all of the grief to say something kind or funny made a difference. Everytime that you said "I'll do it" took a weight off us when we thought we would break. To everyone that said "what can I do" and I asked you to lay bare your feelings and speak for us, my deepest gratitude. To those who carried his body and will never forget that weight borne between them, my most sincere thanks.
I am grateful to each and every one of you for your words, gestures, kindness, hard work and love. You are amazing. Thank you.
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