Time

I would climb
through time
or tear a hole in it
with my fingernails
to get back to you

From Ruth

This was emailed to me a long time ago and I want to have it recorded here. It doesn't particularly reflect how I am feeling at the moment, but I am interested in it.

 

 

You may think the following passage bleak, but I have always thought it painfully comforting:

This is a section from Quaker Faith and Practice

Loneliness after loss is a bitter and unproductive fruit that generally has to be eaten, skin, stone and all. Meanwhile the table bearing the accustomed spiritual refreshment has vanished, as though it never existed.

In the immediate shock of loss there is help. Friends rally, nature supplies an anaesthetic, the doctor offers valium. The crux comes later, just when you supposed the worst was past: companions consider the crisis over and return to their own affairs; the first sharp sting has worn off, and you will have decided to give up drugs. You have no idea what is lying in wait.

But now the real battle begins, the formidable adjustment has to be made. The caring and the sharing will never come back, at least in their past form, and a cold, apparently comfortless, independence has to be shaped to create a life of value. The temptation is to look round for a substitute for the one lost - but people grieving are not their normal selves, they are off balance and their judgment is impaired. A new companionship, if it is to be, is like happiness: no good searching for it, if it arrives it will be as a by-product.

The other temptation is to shirk experiencing the loss to the full when the time has come. A readiness and an openness to the approach of that dark night are necessary. Easy to fill the conscious mind with work, or a contrived 'pleasure-seeking', or do-gooding. The unconscious is preparing the pit, and down into it you will eventually be driven. Better go willingly, with all your armour on. For this is in fact the training ground of your spirit, where you will learn how much, through your own pain, you have to offer to others. And so the first and greatest step out of the dark place becomes recognisable: self-absorption begins to give way to empathy with a world of suffering you previously didn't know existed. People in the first shock of grief will be drawn to you, and you, no longer a newcomer to that world, will have found your listening skills.

As to that delicious and sustaining food you were accustomed in happier times to peck at, why, there it is again, and you haven't recognised it. The former sustenance was only fit for children, and has been replaced by helpings of insight appropriate to your increased maturity.

Margery Still, 1990

Empty

There's a great big, cavernous space in front of my body. My arms are empty.
The hole is so big it hollows out my soul.

Quotes for friends

These are for you, my dearest of friends. I see the tears well in your eyes, and I am grateful that you carry a little of the pain for me. The dark clouds sit heavily on my shoulders, and you are holding them with me. 
The second one is, to me, astounding. Perhaps one day there will be gold. 


"I see your sadness
eating you up inside
and it is slowly
killing me because
I can't do anything
except tell you
I
love
you
and I hope that
will be enough
              for now."

               Unknown


"Some days I wake up
and all I feel
are the fractures
in the flesh
that covers
the only me
I've ever known.
Some days,
it's those exact
fissures
that let the light
hiding inside me
pour out
and cover
in gold
everyone
that found enough beauty
in the cracks
to stand
close. "

Tyler Knott Gregson

Others

I stopped my car in the street a while back to let an old man cross the road in front of me. Well, he was crossing anyway, so I kinda had to. He was small, and he had long, grey, straggly hair and a long, beige, saggy coat. He was hunched right over and he shuffled his feet and carried some bags. I am willing to bet he hadn't showered in quite a while, and I'm willing to bet he didn't live with a roof over his head. And unconsciously, involuntarily I felt this surge of feeling towards him. My insides just filled like a rising tide with sympathy and care and sadness... grief for him, because this is not how it was meant to be. Once, perhaps way back in his youth, his life was not like this. This was not what he was heading for, this was not how it was supposed to turn out. And I know what that feels like.

I said once before that I don't particularly have a new found empathy for people in tragic situations, but perhaps sometimes now I do. I struggle to hear news of people dying, and my mind shifts quickly to the newly bereaved, to all that goes on around this news-flash death, and to the lives of those who have been plummeted in to the pit of grief. I know what it's like there and I am so sorry you are here too. I'm so sorry.

At kindy gym with the kids the other day I raced passed a man sitting on one of the crash mats. He, like me, was surrounded by kids flying everywhere, jumping, running, climbing, bouncing balls, chasing hula hoops, shouting, laughing. And he was missing a leg. In place of his lower right leg he had, not so much an artificial leg, as a metal pole with a piece on the end. And an immediate and again very involuntary thought arrived in my mind, "I know what it's like." You and I, we have something in common. All these people here are the same, but you and I are different. We're missing a part. You're missing a limb. I'm missing a husband.
Never could I really know what it's been like for him, and I won't underestimate it. He must have suffered pain and loss and perhaps even horror that I can't imagine. But I'm still pretty sure I'd give up my leg to have my husband back.

On a wall in Christchurch:

"You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly - that still hurts when the weather gets cold but you learn to dance with the limp."

Anne Lamott

I think I like this. I'm not there yet, but maybe one day these words will be mine. I don't know.

Eleventh

I sat under the bell tower on Saturday. Beside the brick wall, you know, where we had some photos taken. I could feel what you felt like in your suit, and what it felt like to be wearing my dress. I could feel your hand in mine.

I lay and watched the clouds flying across the sunny sky. They moved so fast that it looked as the though the tower was falling towards me. Crushing me. I tried to see past the clouds, past the blue sky and in to Heaven.

One day it will come down. The bricks will be smashed the ground. The red carpet, the wooden pews, the smell of old wood, the beautiful windows, all pulled to pieces. Gone.



Last Saturday was our Wedding Anniversary. The church where we were married is less than 10 % earthquake proof and is to be pulled down.