The trouble is, life doesn’t stop. Even when you want it to.
There is tea to make, and pots to wash, and school runs to do, and bedtime stories to read – with voices. And washing. Constant loads and loads of never-ending laundry.
Your washing machine does not mourn the dead.
It comes relentlessly up day after day and bathes everything in incongruous gold.
The birds sing.
It is such a jarring contrast to what’s inside it hurts – like a chemical reaction – and you are thrown off balance by the violence of exothermic soul dissonance.
I find myself sliding awkwardly sideways through the too-yellow syrup spilled carelessly over the day – not quite in my own body, not knowing if the brightness hurts my eyes or my heart – but wanting it to burn more, hurt MORE. My movements feel slow, and I go about the frustrating minutia of life like an astronaut in anti-gravity, a wasp in honey. I am surprised to find myself at the washing basket, holding dirty clothes, not knowing how I got there. And I watch other people move freely and painlessly around like the world isn’t entirely wrong – and I am half in and half out of it, coming in and out of focus, out of sync, out of breath as the stickiness fills my lungs.
This sense of being in between – in between lives, and deaths, and memories, and dreams and nightmares – of being apart, from the universe, from others, from yourself – erases you. Grief makes YOU the ghost in your life. And you are either too insubstantial to feel real or too wild to feel human – living with a Hyde poltergeist straining just under your own surface.
I know this monster.
It has always been there, waiting.
There are times of my life when it has been small and weedy and I have barely remembered its existence. It has been bigger, and whispered dark things in my ears which I have pretended not to hear. And it has been a raging wild-eyed beast taking me over, thrashing and clawing and writhing and keening – a bloody, sinewed horror-scream made solid.
It takes many different forms and has many names – and it lives within many people, I know. It is Anxiety. Desperation. Depression. Grief. Anguish. Pain.
I have always tried not to let mine take over. When I can feel it I think small thoughts and try and have small feelings and do small things so as not to provoke it. I hang washing out, carefully. Not breathing too hard, in case.
When it has broken free in the past I have been taught that it is ugly – unsightly, unseemly. That it makes me disgusting. I have been left alone with it.
One of the only people who saw it, and could soothe it, was my Dad.
And now he’s gone and it’s HERE – and I’m afraid to let it out. I am afraid of the damage it will do if I don’t.
But I have been lucky. Because for the first time in many, many years, somebody ELSE has looked at it – directly in the face – and not been revolted by it. Somebody else has held me, and seen what’s inside when it is at its most out of control, its most grotesque – and not walked away from me.
I don’t think I realised how much I needed that safe harbour. From the sunshine and from the storm. I don’t think I realised how much I had missed out on.
The washing machine beeps.
There is school uniform that must be dry for next week.
Life continues to roll on.
All any of us can do is to try and keep up.
And maybe find people who will hold onto us when we can’t.
Mumonthenetheredge 