Nine years later...
On remembering that life builds around the loss and that feelings will continue to ebb and flow.
Welcome to Gently Does It! For the most comfortable reading experience hit ‘View in browser’ or if you’re on Substack, head to the app. Happy reading wherever you are! Harriet
Welcome to this Friday’s letter from Yorkshire and hello from my favourite table in one of Ilkley’s many coffee shops. On the first floor and by the window overlooking one of our main shopping streets I tap away while occasionally glancing out the window at passing shoppers. Today it’s a fully caffeinated cappuccino kinda day with a toasted teacake on the side.
If you read last week’s post, firstly thank you, and secondly I’m happy to report that Bella still seems to be completely unfazed by last Friday morning’s exploits (you can read about it here: Help, the dog’s stuck in the tarn) but does seem determined to go back to that same spot and sniff the rock where she slipped which is why we’re keeping her on a short lead.
The past few days though have been spent in south Wales catching up with my sister, brother-in-law and middle son who’s now a month into university life (a month that feels a lot longer and honestly he’s looking far more fresh faced and clear eyed than any fresher I’ve met before, including me).
In between all the conversations waiting to happen and thoughts of walks along Penarth seafront and popping into Griffin Books I think about driving out to the natural burial meadow where mum and dad are buried. Cardiff is where they lived in a narrow victorian terraced house not far from Roath Park for 14 years before they died.
I can’t remember the last time I visited the burial meadow with views across the city, including the Principality Stadium which made this rugby loving family smile, but it was definitely a good few years ago.
And it’s odd because once I’m in Wales, the urge to visit lessens.
On the second evening, at that tipping point where we might swap from tea and biscuits to gin and tonic and bowls of crisps, my sister and I sit at her breakfast bar chatting and I turn to the wall behind us where one of mum’s still life prints hangs. I have the same one in my kitchen.
Something shifts in me as we dig over memories much as our chickens scratch over the earth in our garden. We toss memories and thoughts up into the air. We lightly scratch over the months after mum’s death, grandma’s (mum’s mum) and dad’s too.
There are silences in between piecing our memories together but I don’t feel the same urgency to retell the story of 2015 or dwell on it as I might have done years ago. Months ago even.
‘I’m not sure about going to the burial ground.’
‘There’s no pressure, just see how you feel’
‘I mean, it’s just a field isn’t it. It’s a field with a view and seeing the sheep grazing is lovely but I’m not sure I need to go there to feel close to mum. Or dad.’
Instead we talk about the places where we both feel mum’s presence. Gardens, plants - heucheras specifically - and the Royal Welsh College of Music Friday evening jazz sessions feature in my sister’s list while I describe the wall behind my writing desk. The black and white photo of mum from the 1950s, a framed photo of mum and her friend Flora, an unfinished oil painting of me as a youngster and listening to Ella Fitzgerald or Peggy Lee.
We don’t, in this conversation at least, talk much about dad other than giving him credit for finding the natural burial ground where they lie, if not next to each other, then close enough.
This thought that I don’t need to physically be in mum and dad’s final resting place, that I don’t need a headstone to remember them, to feel them with me sits with me as I wander down the clifftop path to the pier with my son the following afternoon.
It’s the path the runs behind the Marie Curie hospice where mum spent her final 36 hours in a room on the first or was it second floor on the side of the square redbrick building. The sea just visible from her window if you crane your neck.
I look up to where I imagine her room was. I think of her final Saturday morning when I found myself alone with her for a few hours. Me flicking through magazines, letters and words swimming on the page, glancing up at this woman who looks like mum but has now suffered some catastrophic what? Brain haemorrhage?
I don’t know what’s happened overnight in medical terms, what I do know is that the nurses have moved her into one of those standard issue hospice armchairs while they change her bed linen. She sits upright, staring, but her blue eyes are vacant where once they might once have pinned me to the back of my chair. She looks through me while her hands rest in her lap or float in the air rather than more familiar movements like reaching for a mug or pushing her straw blonde fringe back off her forehead.
I stay for a tranquil, silent few hours before my sister arrives. I hesitate as I stand in front of mum knowing, yet not knowing that this would be the last time I’d be with her alive. She’s already slipped from grasp.
I get in the car and drive. Dual carriageway gives way to narrowing country lanes all dense green hedgerows and late Spring sun while the Radio 4 burbles. A programme about Clementine Churchill that I listen to but don’t hear. I fancy, but I don’t know for sure, that I drive past the turning for the natural burial ground. Or maybe that’s just me wanting to tie this story up with a neat bow.
Back on the clifftop path this week I pause and pull my son back, pointing to the Marie Curie banner looped over the garden railings and explain that this is where mum, grandma died. I hesitate before sharing this with him, wondering why I feel the need to tell him but realise that his knowledge of this part of the story is patchy because I’ve kept so much of it inside me.
I’ve told the story over and over again in my head and in the pages of closed notebooks but maybe I haven’t said the words out loud.
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler
This hospice with its solid bricks and sea view is significant because this is where mum died, yet somehow each time I drive past its entrance or walk past its gardens its pull on me lessens. And that feels ok.
The curly haired middle child and I carry on walking down to the pier, dodging pint-sized children clad in skeleton and witches costumes, brandishing pumpkin shaped buckets ready for sweets and an afternoon of Halloween fun at the Pier.
We walk to the end of the pier, passing silent men casting out their fishing lines and I listen as he fills my head with talk of his week of working with ceramics. All slip casting, hand building, stoneware and earthenware and how he sits next to a woman who was on Great British Pottery Throwdown but he can’t remember her name, or which series she was in despite chatting to her each week.
We wander up and down the seafront, sit on a bench and walk back to the pier because I need to keep moving alongside the sea. He chats, I interject with the odd observation and question before we head slowly back up the hill to my sister and 15-year old daughter who’s burrowed beneath her duvet watching Derry Girls.
Later that evening he shares his ceramic tutor’s Instagram feed with a ‘I think you’d like her’ and videos from a bar where he and friends are listening to some jazz, ‘Next time you’ll have to come here too.’
Life pulls me forward and the glimpses back are just that, glimpses.
There was no right or wrong answer to the burial ground question this week and who knows, I might feel differently the next time I’m down there. I know enough, nine years on, to know that these feelings ebb and flow but it does strike me that maybe I’m letting go of some of the grieving symbols I’ve been holding onto so tightly.
Reading, watching and listening
I spotted Tessa Hadley’s ‘After the funeral’ on Substack last weekend and added it to my ‘must buy’ list only to spot it on my sister’s immaculately organised bookshelves on Monday evening. Beautifully written short stories that more than live up to the plaudits on the front and back covers, I’ve brought it home with me.
I've been a fan of Gabor Mate for a few years now and took delivery of ‘When the body says no’ last week, and listened to Kirsty Young interview him for her Young Again podcast on the drive to Wales.
There’s so much to unpack (the same goes for Bessel van der Kolk’s The body knows the score) especially this time of year. More than I can unpack right now. It was October half term in 2012 when, chatting to a friend in Victoria Park in Bath while our children played and made plans for trick or treating, I said that this virus that had wiped me out felt different. I couldn’t explain how or why, I just felt that something had shifted in me.
I was later diagnosed with ME/fibromyalgia and although sitting here 12 years later with my diagnosis well past its sell by date, it still lingers, much as the breast cancer does. Both have left an imprint physically and mentally and it’s possibly why
‘What is a healthy life’ post chimed this week. She also interviewed Gabor Mate earlier this year and you can read those posts on her publication page too.I want to feel well. I want to find out what kind of life makes me feel well. And I want to live that life, no matter how far it might diverge from the things I think I’m meant to be doing.
Marianne Power, What is a healthy life
Finally, I caught Anna Maxwell Martin on Woman’s Hour on the drive too. There to talk about her upcoming ITV series ‘Until I kill you’ and BBC’s Ludwig (which I’ve loved) the interview shifted gear when she talked about the death of her husband three years ago. She spoke movingly about her grief whilst caring for their two children, before turning to her experience of navigating the SEND (special educational needs) system. I don’t know how long the interview was but I was hooked throughout. Well worth catching if you can.
Thank you as ever for reading, and don’t forget you can find all my posts on my Gently Does It homepage. Think of it as a magazine you can dip in and out of. Even if the email ends up buried in your inbox or slips down the notifications in the Substack app, the words are there whenever you want to read them.
Harriet
This is lovely, Harriet, so soothing, even in its sadness. All love to you 🥰