Death

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Island Blog – Forward into Life

It feels like ages since I last wrote a blog, and it is, ages. So where have I been? Into a strange world, one I have never visited before, one I cannot locate on a map, a whole new country.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning.

Two, or more, weeks ago, I felt weary and lethargic, two feelings alien to me, two that begged investigation and not by me alone. I was aching and sore, my arms unable to reach for anything without a wince of pain. I was un-hungry and found it hard to get comfortable in bed. A friend drove me to my doctor’s appointment and within minutes she called the local hospital to admit me. As a thankfully healthy woman with little experience of hospitals beyond the birthing of babies, I was surprised but acquiescent, feeling as unwell as I did. Once there, the doctor checked me out, focussing on an insect bite on my back, around which was a raised pink swelling. Two days later I was moved to the mainland, to a bigger hospital.

Over the next 4 hours the red spread and I was pretty much out of it. Pumped full of super strong antibiotics, drip fed, and trying to get comfortable, the days and nights passed in a blur, interrupted only by regular checks on my state of health and the nightly delivery of other souls into a hospital bed. These women, frightened, most of whom had fallen, all who lived alone, were quieted eventually by the excellent and compassionate nursing team.

After five days, I came back to life, having no idea how seriously ill I had been. Everything escalated so fast, too fast for me to comprehend but not beyond the understanding and medical intelligence of the doctors in charge. I remember walking to the window to see the pretty garden beneath, the trees, the flowering shrubs, the wheel and scatter of swifts and house martins cutting the sky in half as the bugs rose from hiding and becoming lunch. I remember feeling upright and not so sore, the joy of it, the thankfulness rising in me, a mother hug. I remember hot porridge for breakfast, the excellent meals served daily. I remember the cleaners, their smiles as they washed down the ward eveery day. I remember the can-do attitude of the nurses (lordy what a job!) and the bright light laughter from each nursing shift that skittered along the corridors, spilling into each ward to make the vulnerable smile. I remember talking to other inmates, hearing their stories, holding hands that had held so many other hands over so many years. I remember the sadness and joy of visitors around beds, the muffled conversations, the concern etched on family faces. I remember quiet conversations with a night nurse, waking me yet again for a health check, the administration of yet another drip. I remember the smiles, the reasurrances, the gentle touch of a confident hand on my own wobbly one. All will be well, the hand said, in the end. Keep fighting. Gradually, I became mobile again, walking around the hospital carpark, up to the helipad, seeing goldfinches feeding on grass seeds, their unique chatter like champagne bubbles in my ears. Everything felt new, as if I was a newborn and seeing all this life for the first time. I suspect anyone who has faced down death will know what I mean, even though I couldn’t, and still can’t, really believe it to be true for me. Severe cellulitis is dangerous. And all, it seems, from an insect bite on my back. That tiny creature, that random bite nearly did for me. And, yet, I thank it. How else could I know what it is to be newborn at 70? T’is a rare and beautiful gift indeed.

Now, as I recuperate with family, resting, building new strength into momentarily wasted muscles, while I move around the sun dappled garden, watching the dogs play and hearing the laughter of happy girls on holiday, all I feel is a daily upwelling of gratitude, for life herself, for the medical care and affection, for my family’s support and love. When I am home again among the beloved hills of the island, watching the tidal dance, hearing the sea-birds call as the fish rush in, I will remember this time, all of it, all the tiny details of such a strange journey. From nearly dead to very much alive, a moving forward into life, a new one, a gift, a second chance.

It will take me sometime to process and a forever to forget.

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Island Blog – RIP Old Friend

I knew it was coming but not when. Meantime, not knowing the ‘when’ part, my days continued ordinary and soft, although the sadness lifted my ruffles from time to time making me shiver. Those around his bed would know more, I knew that, just as we had known as we watched our own ‘him’ move invisibly towards that other place whence no-one ever returns. He was ill, he was dying and yet the hold on life seems to me to defy even intense pain and the desire for it all to end, for a life to end. Life is a strong force indeed, no matter how careless we may be around the years we live it. We hold on and hold on and why, when it is clear to everyone, to ourselves, that death is in the room patiently waiting for our fingers to let go.

I picture an image of those children, now with children of their own, of my friend, his wife, around his last bed. I know the taste of exhaustion, the longing for it to be over, the fear of just that. I know the smell of dying, the sound of it in raspy and hesitant breaths, the lift of gallows humour among the watchers, laughter flying around the room, small fry defence against the enormity of what lies before them all. A whole long life almost gone but not quite, no, another breath, the rise of it a sinking inside the room. Let him go. Let. Him. Go. But he defies the wish and breathes on and on and on and the night watchers watch and there is tea and coffee for staying awake and stories to fill the room. Remember This? Remember when he, when we, that time on the beach, on the farm, during the thunder storm, when the dog died, that party, my wedding, my wedding, my wedding?

And his wife of over 50 years will be numb. What do you do after over 50 years as a man’s wife, as mother to his children? Does anybody know the answer to that? You were a young beauty back then, full of hope and sparkles and dreams, a real catch, they said, lucky him, they said, and he was. To be a farmer’s wife is no easy task. Nobody takes shifts, you just both shift and often at the drop of a hat, or a piglet or a calf. You rise from slumber because you have to. There is nobody else will take this job, not at this hour when night is still heavy black and dawn is miles away enjoying herself. You take it all on. So what happens to your dreams and hopes and sparkles? Ah…….good question, and here comes strength and spirit and the life force within and she has plenty of that, this new widow, my old friend.

I know what it is like to be a widow and I also know it has taken me over two years to even like myself in my solo role, one I yearned for so many times but had no clue about until he breathed his last. It was a relief, at first. Nobody wants to watch suffering after all, but that doesn’t last. I know that she will be busy and organised at first, dealing with admin and people and responding to sympathy cards et lala , but about two months in, it hits like a demolition ball, wheeching the feet out from under and with just cold ground on which to land. I wish I could wish this away for her but I cannot. I know the impact of this explosion will be huge for his children but not in the same way. She is now alone in her lovely cottage and no amount of warmth from the range and the fires will un-chill her, because, and I am only observing here, her marriage, like my own, was a traditional one (although she is a lot feistier that I) and he will have taken care of things she never had to learn.

And so, it is. It makes no difference at all that he was of a ‘good age’ as if that makes it acceptable. The death of a life is never that. A whole person is gone, all of the irritations, all of the expectations, frustrations, criticisms, encouragements, smiles, rejections, affection and direction has hit the final buffers. We are now arriving at Death Station where this train will terminate. Just like that. Just today. He is gone. RIP old friend.

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Island Blog – A Finagle, Life, Death and Beauty

I have spent many days finagling with my bird feeders. Initially I moved them, a no brainer, from the middle of the tiny front garden because my neighbour let her cats out. They are beautiful creatures, tortoiseshell and long limbed with amber eyes, a bit like the Scottish Wildcat. The male, Hamish, is particularly friendly so that I just could not squirt him with a water pistol after he leaped onto the bird table and made himself comfortable, awaiting breakfast or lunch. The female, a fast hunter was more wily. She found that to hide beneath a Pieris Japonica gave her just the chance she needed to pounce-and-claw a bird too many times. I wheeched out the bird table and cut all the lower branches of the PJ, thus un-hiding her. I still couldn’t bring myself to squirt. I am not, by nature, a squirter, preferring as I do to befriend all animals including human ones. Then there was the sparrow hawk, her dive of certain death, for she rarely misses. He, her mate, prettier by far with his red and indigo colouring is smaller, slower and more likely to be on my Christmas list, much as I respect his missus. I walked out once and it must have caught her mid dive, mid dive at 80mph from the ancient pines back of house for I felt her lift my hair, the touch of her claw on my head before she lifted up and away, no doubt in relief. The bird table, mid grass, made successful hunting all too easy and although I know sparrow hawks mun eat too, I didn’t want to feel that I was holding out a plateful of sparrows, finches, blackbirds and robins like a waitress in a restaurant.

I moved all my beautifully honed bespoke iron feeder posts, some swirls, some twists, some straight up and down to just beside the fence. I eyed the line from ancient pines to bird swipe and saw that any dive could be a disaster. My mini, parked close by and the wheelie bins in line would certainly threaten a headache at the very least. Satisfied, I watched the daily arrival of my feathered friends. A sudden throng of sparrows, maybe 20 at a time, fluttering in as a group to feed; a nervousness of goldfinch, individual robins and a bicker of blackbirds, all friendly as I walk out, staying nearby, chirping at me. I am a friend, unfeathered, slow-moving, soft spoken. There is no squirter in me, no fast diver of death and with no desire to eat any of them, and they know it. But wait. The ground feeder birds, blackbirds and robin redbreast, do not have the feets to cling as tits and goldfinch do. They need some flat base upon which to land. I eye my bird table now resting in the garage and shake my head. It’s big enough for a cat, remember? So I order online what looks like a flour sieve with a hooky thing for attachment, to what I couldn’t work out but I’m resourceful enough, so I tell myself. It arrives and I wander out barefoot in the snow (you should try it, so so so exhilarating) on a quest to find something to attach the hooky thing to. A post, yes, perfect. I find a slim post and embed it into a raised bed near to my beautifully honed bespoke iron feeder posts and wait. The first to come is the coal tit, the bravest alongside a wren and the most curious. Others follow and I am all smiles and delight, until. Like a bolt of lightning, a female sparrow hawk dives, grabs mid-air and lifts away with a sparrow. I hear its cry of alarm and pain and they are gone. Furious at myself I stomp back out to remove what, in effect, was my waitress in a restaurant offering plate. I study the line from pine to pain once again, and what I need to do is to sort of hide the tray of seed behind something, but what something? Here it is, my wrought iron sweet pea cone with nobbles and sticking up bits, all ready to stand like a solid bodyguard between life and death. So far it’s working. When the sparrow hawk comes I no longer feel outrage and fury for they must eat and their flight and accuracy is a marvel to watch, but, like a mother, I will do whatever it takes to protect those within my power to protect. If I invite birds in, I take responsibility for their safety, as best I can.

I like the way I feel, the way I act. I love being curious. I also am happy to be aware of how nature works, how life becomes death in a flash, how species need to hunt in order to survive. Garden birds are pretty, beautiful to watch, but now I can watch death without thinking it cruel. It’s normal. It is how it is. And soon, I am off to Africa for 2 months. Let us see how accepting I am of the predators out there, the leopard, lion, hyena, hunting dogs, cheetah and many more as they bring down impala, zebra, giraffe or buffalo (only I don’t recommend that one, the most ferocious of bovines). I hope not to see it happen but I might. Beautiful predators, beautiful prey. It’s a tough one for us to accept. Perhaps that is what makes us compassionate human beings. I like that. I’ll stick with that.

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Island Blog – Rememberus

This day is Remembrance Day. I know it is customary to remember on Sunday but I hook my line to the actual day. Today. I reel in those who were dead before their time, all of them. Although it is never an ok time to die, not if you are loved and still want to live just a bit more, this sharp snap of the line came anyway. So much I wanted to say, to ask, to laugh with you about, even, as in many cases, just the time to get to know you better. You could be my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, my best friend, my child. The rippling out of such grief is like a whole new wasteland beneath your feet. You wonder why the whole world hasn’t stopped, well, dead. You idle through the days feeling pointless. You were something, somebody to someone, a one you took for granted would always be there for you, a someone who made you feel that your little life really meant something, was important, powerfully influential. It’s as if that sudden death wiped out a whole carefully built beauty of experiences and secrets shared, moments that lit flames you never knew could be lit at all.

Although I write this, I have no experience of such a sudden loss. I feel the pain vicariously. To have received that telegram, that policeman at the door, that phone call, shudders me. It could have happened to me, but it didn’t. I have spoken with those who know, firsthand, this shattering agony and then watched them sink and diminish, lose their strength, their spirit, falter at what we on the outside of the inside of this awful shit might consider nothing much. Going out to buy milk: taking the dog for a walk: answering the phone: washing, eating, changing the bed, little things that overnight turn into impossible mountains stuck smack in a once familiar path. Their shoes are wrong for this terrain. They don’t recognise the face in the mirror. There is no forward.

And then, overtime, they rise, these brave, lost, scared and angry people. I’ve watched them do it. They walk now, as those women did during wartime and long after when brain shattered men and women returned damaged, in need of help and receiving none, or little. They force themselves up and out. They remind themselves that all those infuriating platitudes are meant well. Bit by bit they re-engage with small talk, very small talk, peacetime talk. The weather, local gossip, criticisms based on absolutely no information. Their eyes glaze but, politely, their shoes remain affixed to the pavement. What they know, what they have been through, is beyond our ken and forever thus.

To the ones who are destined to remain. I salute you. A lost child, a friend, a family member, a partner. You are The Brave, just because of your strong spirit, your determination to survive even when you really didn’t want to.

To the ones who were snatched away, who kept going through all the fear, who loved life enough to leap into the flames, who were caught in an accident, an incident, a tragedy, a twist of fate. You are The Brave.

Rememberus?

I do.

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Island Blog – A Tundra Meet Without

Talking with an old friend today, I found my thinks coming into my mouth in words. It’s interesting how, when this happens, words can jumble like something as yet un-sorted through, like a crowd in disarray and in need of leadership and organisation, like kids in an unsupervised playground at break time. In both of these, the dominant factor is escape from a confined space. In the first, a big poly-bag, in the second the limitation of a desk, the well-breathed air of a morning’s lessons and the four walls that surround. It’s the same with the release of words after long hours of nobody to speak with beyond Myself (and she is always lurking) the dog, the geraniums and the disinterest of Radio 2.

My friend says something about her own loss and bereavement and there’s a tidal wave rising in my throat. I can feel it and I swallow down, mostly to no avail. I can blurt. The very best of us can blurt after all even as we may pretend we absolutely never do. It isn’t that I want to fix my friend, not at all. How can I ever know, no matter how much she tells me how life is for her, understand fully a sadness I cannot imagine? This applies to anyone I meet. We are all unique, in joys, in pain, in experience, in a zillion other ways. But the impulsive desire to connect on common ground is only human. If I care, I care, but my words need leadership. I am not a helmsman, nor helmswoman , nor helmsperson or whatever title is now socially acceptable. I am an excellent crew, Himself told me this oftentimes and he liked having an excellent crew for a wife. In fact, he liked it so much that I was never taught to helm at all. Funny, though, I do remember basking in the glory of being a First Mate as if the glass ceiling didn’t bother me one bit. I think differently now. I digress…….

I know I am more distant than my friend in terms of the death bit and by many months. I also know that I am planets away from her experience. But the grief we share, the common ground, is still tundra for us both and here we can meet. We fill in time, we tell each other. We do a little thing and then another little thing after the first little thing as we crawl our way through the days Without. And here we can help each other. We can laugh together about the extraordinary and astonishing things our friends say with good and loving intent. ‘Are you ‘there’ yet?’ ‘You should get out more, dress up, volunteer…’ All questions and suggestions are kindly meant, we who are crawling through the tundra, know this. But we can be lonely out there. We didn’t know we were going there at all but here we are, stumbling over the rocks of guilt and regret, passed the cacti of lost opportunities seen through the sharp looking eyes of hindsight. We trip over raised issues unresolved for ever. We shiver in the ice-winds of anger and burn in the sandstorms of confusion. We long for butterflies and an oasis of shade, the promise of an end to this timeless wandering only to find yet another mirage that shimmers and shivers into another day of the same.

And we laugh as we eat our lunch in the island sunshine. We sip our coffee and erupt into nonsense as our eyes connect and sparkle. We remind each other that, before this, we were girls, wild girls, brimming with hope and trust and now, now, in this swathe of tundra, we know we want to find that spirit once again. We take a wander around the island charity shop, laughing about what neither of us can wear again, but how we did once, oh we did once. And we part. I drive home left and she goes right. I know that both of us have been lifted this day. We found an oasis and it was no mirage. Although we both return to filling in the hours, we will remember each other and we will smile. We will both have learned a new something, a new way to look at an old thing and this, I believe is what life really offers each one of us. It is no easy ride for anyone. Not anyone, but the anyones who decide to be open, looking out, honest about how they feel and best of all, courageous enough to ask for help, well, they, we, have the best chance of moving onward. Not to forget, no. But, instead to learn to live on Without. There will always be a missing, no matter the relief initially felt (in my case) at the death. There will be months, years of just getting through each day, but one day, one day, waking up will feel good and the day ahead will be full of promise. I know it.

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Island Blog – Some Days and a Dragon

Some days lift without me doing a thing about said lift-ness. Rising with the early light, everything flows in perfect synergy with everything else and there is no chaos within or without. My body feels lithe and supple, the music, Satie’s Gymnopedies, swims through the dawn, my home and me. Birds flit between the feeders, goldfinch, siskin, blackbird, sparrow, woodpecker, dunnock, chaffinch. No neighbourly cat yet to explode them into the sky, no sparrowhawk to bring them down, just soft reverence to Life herself. I dress, make coffee and wonder how everyone else feels about this morning. Across the sea-loch, mist ghosts the hills below what might just be a blue sky. I haven’t seen one of those for weeks and it’s a welcome sight, one not to be taken for granted as we don’t get ‘spells’ of weather on this island. One day may be all we can ask for, one day of dry, a gift and not one to be ignored but instead to be celebrated actively, mindfully, each minute thoroughly lived because tomorrow, that day that never comes, may well open grey and wet, the sky closed once again.

During these widow days I have known many mornings, many hours of self-doubt and fear, of loneliness and sometimes, despair. Although I know that I must, absolutely must, animate my inner poltroon, start believing and continue to believe that I am more than able to live not only a solo life but one which can still really live even with a missing part. It will always be thus because 50 years of marriage is a very big chunk of any life and to be left behind inside that life now empty of all that was familiar is discombobulating at best. It is almost 2 years now, no, more, because dementia eats a person up little by little and ten years of watching that monster nibble away changed us both. But still, the familiar remained. I knew him and he knew me and no matter the ancient battles fought, neither of us ever won. Now I am just me and sometimes I feel very small indeed. I can spend all night awake freaking out about absolutely nothing real, such as what I will do when my oil tank leaks gallons of oil into the garden, or a huge pine crashes through my roof opening me to the sky in the midst of a hooligan gale when it’s snowing and my neighbours are away in Tenerife? Now, however, a bit further along the road un-travelled I find myself wandering through interspace, a sort of misty corridor of in-between. I am moving, learning how to create a new familiar. Ignoring the clamjamfrie of panics, I sit with myself and we chat. What can you do within this situation, she asks. I close my eyes and let said situation settle into some sort of shape. Nothing about the being alone thing, I begin. She nods. Nothing about the gale. Ah, but I can ask a tree man to check the pines and I can call the oil tank man to check that. Good, she says. Get on with it.

There is nobody in this world, no matter how rich, how well-organised, how balanced who can avoid the big things. Things like gales, oil leaks, death. Nobody. So that means that all of us can learn new ways, a new familiar, but only having gone through the dark times, the rain days, the storms both inside and out. Courage in the face of ‘disaster’ has legs, a brain, strength and power. Fears flit like birds all the time but I can explode them into the sky if I think ‘cat.’ Imagining disaster is normal but not liveable with for long. This state demands action, not helpless panic. To ask, What can I do about any of this? is the question, followed by action and fuelled with courage, even if it feels as though courage seems to have gone off to India to find itself. The human spirit is unbreakable unless that human turns his or her face to the wall and I am not doing that, no matter what.

I was reading about Koi the other day, those beautiful Japanese fish (originally from China) we might see in lakes and ponds far far away from this place. Koi represent courage, the overcoming of difficulties, challenges, big horrible threatening life-changing things. It is said that Koi can swim upstream against any current. It can fight its way to the top of a waterfall and when it arrives at the top, will transform into a powerful dragon, not a destructive one but one re-shaped by all that life has thrown at it, all that it has learned on its journey. I like the idea of that. The thought lifts me, encourages me to face my challenges, make friends with my loneliness, and more, to keep on keeping on whilst engaging completely with it all, even the fearty times. I might become that dragon one day. What larks, Pip!

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Island Blog – There’s something about ‘dead.’

When someone dies you might think, well, that’s that, he or she is gone. I’ll be fine. I am sensible, practical la la la. However, I am discovering that this is not the truth at all. Yes, the person is dead and gone and I am not fine at all, or wasn’t fine at all for a long while. However, something comes alive from that death and it grows and thrives in so many unexpected ways. Beyond the initial shock come a swingle of emotions and they can last for as long as they last. Anger, despair, denial, acceptance, to name but a few and each one of these can burst into life within a single day leaving us exhausted, confused, beaten up. It isn’t possible for anyone outside of bereavement to fully understand, let alone feel these emotions. All they can do is to stay quiet, give no advice at all and to simply walk beside us as we explode into the sky or melt into a cold and dirty puddle on the ground.

But this ‘alive’ thing. What do I mean? I think the best way to describe myself is through imagery. Imagine, if you will, a desolate landscape, one that didn’t appear politely and over time but more as the result of a nuclear explosion. One moment I looked out on trees, flowers, seasons, skychange. I sat by running water, heard its song, watched birds fly overhead, geese migrating, sun rise and sunset. I was complacent in this, expecting my world to look this way every time I chose to look out of my window. I knew, even from behind closed curtains, the promise of a morning. Rain, wind, soft warm air, still waters or the spit and roar of wildflow over rocks. Then in just a single moment, all is desolation, all is grey and empty. I see no green, no landscape, no lift of hill nor fall of valley. The ground is flat and without character, without balance.

Over time I come to accept this new view from my windows. Each day is the same as the one before and here flickers the first flame of ‘alive’. I can see the little spark, watch that spark grow into warming fire. I reach my hands to it. There isn’t much warmth to be honest, but it is the first lift of orange I have seen in this grey nothing and I am keen to fan it into something more. Although the outside shows me same old, inside something is keen to live and I recognise it as the human spirit. I feel a lift in my heart even though all that I ever knew is gone now, and forever. But I am still here and the me in me has no intention of turning grey and flat, it seems. I rise and dress in colours. I decide to cook something delicious. I turn up the tunes and jig a bit around the kitchen. Each time I begin something I can feel the inner flames lift as a new breeze tickles them higher. Each time I begin something I am adding kindling to the fire. I am tending myself. I am saying that, even though the outside of me may stay grey and flat for some time to come, I am the fire of my future and the more I tend the alive in me, the more I realise that this need for living warmth came directly from a death. When the dead one wasn’t dead, I was as complacent as one expecting to see the same world outside my windows as I did yesterday, and all my complacent yesterdays. I took it all for granted without a question in my mouth. Now I have a zillion questions all flying out into the empty rooms like trapped birds. I open the window to set them free. One by one, they fly and as they do, as I busy myself with being alive, I glance out. There is colour, I see it, Look, over there! And there, and there. The grey is beginning to live again. As am I. Although the landscape will never look as it once did, I know now that this blank canvas is aching for me to get out there with my paint and my colours. I have no idea where to begin but that doesn’t matter anymore. If ‘dead’ is going to have any significant impact on me then let it be this inner, cleansing, warming fire of Very Much Alive.

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Island Blog – Wave the White Flag

When I write about me I don’t. I write with the knowing that many others feel as I feel, move as I move through the days of this and that, of should I or should I absolutely not, and if I go for the absolutely not, what then? In the days of change, we all know the insecurity of that question, the wobbly boards we navigate to what we hope is safe ground. It might take weeks, months, years. It might be a decision to change from a job we hate, or a relationship we have been unhappy in for years. It might be the death of a longtime partner. The bullet ricochet of that one is something else and I will tell you why. You think you can manage, you believe you will suddenly become who you were before. But this is a lie. As is the belief in the transcode of such a conversion. (From verb to noun, apologies grammar buffs)for nothing happens easy. The first decision to step out into the heretofore unknown, even if observed in others’ journeys, is massively brave. You think there is a cliff and you see your foot out there in space. The fall? Is a killing one for sure. But, but and but again, once you let go, once you give up, wave the white flag and surrender, you look back down again and chuckle. This cliff is but a fault line, a nothing, a thing you could have leapt across as a toddler. You step out. You don’t fall at all. Even you could never fall through such a tiny skint in the landscape of your life. Remember that.

I have watched all of my children on that cusp and, because I recognise it so well, I just said, Go. Step out. Let go. Wave the white flag. Surrender to your imagined fears for they will not follow you. They are imagined and they are nothing but whispers in the dust of your past the moment you take that first step. And the surrender is pivotal. We resist our fears, let them consume us, guide us. T’is a mistake. Another mistake is to deny our fears, our very real fears. We might fear enclosed spaces. We might fear patriarchal domination. We might fear matriarchal domination. The two latter will come back to bite us in the workplace, in relationships, in new friendships or of being suddenly and terminally alone. We might fear spiders or open spaces or crowds or travel or so many other things. All of these and more are real and need to be respected. There may well be a psychological explanation for our fears but that doesn’t stop the fearing of them. Logic does not help. We know the logic. The thing is to say YES, I fear this!

Thus, as a fearing one, I have learned the power of giving up to my fear, of waving the white flag, of saying Yes, I fear you. And what that means to me is this. I speak it out, not to others but to myself. I claim it, this fear, I acknowledge it, I affirm it. I say, hallo, in you come. I have fought you for so long and I am weary of the fight. So we talk. And, when the time is right and I decide to wave the white flag, I find a turning. It is as if I have just made friends with a long term enemy who was never an enemy at all, just one who was challenging me in order for me to move on.

So in conclusion. Giving up is not giving in. And there was me thinking they were conjoined against me.

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Island Blog – I wish as you wish

It doesn’t matter how much he or she irritated the bejabers out of you at times. It doesn’t matter how many times you may have wished them away for longer so you could drown the goldfish, sleep wide in the bed, eat what you wanted or go out spontaneously and without curfew. Once they are gone, we are all lost. With my logic head as Speaker, I get it. Of course we are lost. We have been with this person of irritation/love for decades. We know them, or we think we do and they knew us as they think they did. There was a compliance, a working together, a stand-back or fight thingy. A thingy that became our normal.

When our normal is thrust into outer space, just like that, no matter the months or years of caring nor even if the separation is sudden, we are actively lost. I say ‘actively’, because it is just that. When the whole thing about living together stops dead, we just don’t know who we are anymore. Active still wants to be active. We find things to do and over-do. We still have the momentum we always had but what is lost now is purpose. Why am I still doing this, this getting dressed/ stepping out thing when I come home to nobody, not to the smile, the questioning, even the sharp remarks about how long it takes to go to the local shop?

Most of us are productive, action folk, oftentimes because that is what life needs us to be. Just think about it. I mean, who on earth sees the massive role they are suddenly required to ontake when they fall in love? Well, not one of us, that’s who; suddenly wife; suddenly husband; suddenly parents; suddenly carer. And then it stops. Dead. We were running with it all, weren’t we, and fast, just yesterday and then we meet the buffers. I don’t know if you have experienced meeting the buffers on the inside of a train with a driver who wasn’t ready. Well I have and it sent sandwiches and old ladies off piste and flying wide. Not pretty, neither of them. It is way worse in life. Way worse. Did I miss something? Was I being selfish, looking the other way?

When a partner dies, we may be relieved. I was and I am not afraid to speak it out. Although I was the primary and the (godlovethistitle) unpaid carer, not everyone goes through it and I am glad of it. Nonetheless this place is my experience and thus I cannot imagine sudden death, the shock of it rippling for ever, the inner questioning, the self doubt and the regret for all the words unsaid, the loving gifts not given. Let me tell you, those of you aforementioned, that the I feel the same sans your experience. I wish I had said this and not said that. I wish I had asked more questions, been kinder. I wish as you wish.

And the ripples go on. Think not, no matter how he or she irritated, that the ‘lost’ will dissipate soon. It won’t. And do you know why? Well, I’ll tell you. It is because you care. Even in storm conditions for years, even when you just wanted out, even for a month or a year, the human heart has a deep sense of allegiance. It is nothing to do with logic. It is who we are. So if you know loss as a wife, a husband, a father, a mother, a partner, a sibling or a friend, rest easy my lovelies. Let the ripples flow on because they will even if you build a dam. It takes time to be okay with the loss of someone and then, eventually, to find yourself, a shrimp in a desert, yet still strong enough to find the sea.

by

Island Blog – The Dance

I have just cleaned my screen. It took a while to eliminate all the greasy finger marks upon’t. T’is done now and my screen is blaring white and clean, causing me to pull back a bit as if in the headlights of a oncoming car. I recover. I consider ‘clean’ against ‘not clean but easy to work with’ and I confounder myself. What else is not clean but easy to work with in my life? I am rocketing towards 70 and that’s an OMG, here she goes thing for children, probably now in their 40’s.

Moving on (quickly). This day I have listened to 3 TED talks on End Of Life. The one thing only we, in the West have any problem with. I mean, people, for goodness sake! We are all going to face it. But how? We don’t know when but we can decide the how of it. As I am doing. And, with great respect I will challenge anyone who is not clear about their choices for that time that will come to us all. Oh, yes, I have heard my fellows telling me I am being morbid but I dance those tellings away because I have been there with the generation above me, now long gone. It is more than a choice. It is a responsibility. Just saying. A Power of Attorney and a Living Will. Easy. Done and freeing for the kids who grieve and grieving slams you into space, one you don’t know, don’t like, fear and run from but which engulfs you for years and affects every step you, the left-behind, is left to take, day by gruelling day.

I am almost there on the legal stuff, which, by the way is a thixotrope of complexity. I remember when the Old Sea Dog was wheeched off to Glasgow with one of his 3 heart valves (2 down) doing it’s best (I named it, the only valve working, Falkor (you have to see the Never-ending Story to know that name), and whilst said Sea Dog was, to say the least, discombobulated, we could find no legal, official thing about his living will. That lack caused my kids intense angst. I don’t want that again for them. Hence I am required to act. No, I require me to act. It is only fair. Many I know have all this in place. And an equal many wave it away. The list is What I Want For My End of Life. It is so simple and yet here we run from it as if anyone can ever run from Death.

I love Fun. Fun is my absolute friend. If someone says Come Now and With Boots On, I am ready in 2 minutes. How much preparation does anyone need for Fun? It is gone in seconds unless we are are ready for it every moment of every day, even the dark ones, the cold ones and cloudydeep ones, the ones we don’t want to wake up for, the same old day tramping like nuns through the cold of our bereaved and broken lives, even then. Even them.

Moving into later life is not a time to deny that life. It is ours. We can ‘old’ with attitude or we can hide away and pretend it isn’t coming, tell ourselves we now have to wear sensible colours, forget the music in the pub that we loved, deny travel because travel is scary (for all of us btw)and fold in. why? Well, I am there, so I can tell you. We don’t want to look like fools. That’s it. We know where we are even as our kids want to tell us we will live forever. We won’t. Let us brave up and make things clear. Let us.

On a swippy note, I am listening to dance tunes in my kitchen as I cook my supper. I love the flavour, the swing, the colour, the flow and the creativity of this dance for life. Although limbs might not respond as they once did, so what! They did once and didn’t my body love that? Yes. it did. Celebrate old body and dance on when you can and if you can. Just don’t deny the olding. Just don’t. It is our path. It is so glorious, so freeing, so fresh and so, well, the dance.