five familiar phrases these days…

I can’t quite believe I get to write sentences with the words cancer/terminal/died yet again.

On Monday afternoon my step-dad died. It was five months to the day since my mother died, and 72 days since my mother-in-law died. They all had cancer, faith and years of treatment which finally was no match for the chaos inside their bodies.

It is strange to have written those words to various friends and colleagues at certain points over the last few months. In some ways death feels very normal right now. Like playground bullies and icily-beautiful women, death is profoundly less intimidating up close than it is from a distance. I fear it less today than I did a year ago, and I don’t think that I have drifted into paranoia – I mean, I don’t worry about other members of my family getting sick and dying. There aren’t that many of them left anyway.

But who am I kidding? We’ve chucked the microwave, upped the fruit & veg and I’m back to my old hobby of entering half marathons and running them very slowly.

It’s aliveness that I’m pursuing.

It was after my mother’s death that I realised that I was experiencing something odd in the midst of the grief; happiness. It seemed bizarre at first until someone wise joined the dots for me; he talked about ‘exquisite grief’ and it suddenly became clear that experiencing the pain of missing someone does not mean that life becomes grey. Grief is not necessarily welded to depression. In fact, the root of the word links it in with the carrying of something heavy. It takes strength to do this and the work is not without reward. Maybe, in some way, the deeper the relationship one looses, the better prepared one is for the carrying. It might not be a lighter load, but perhaps one is able to take it further. I don’t know about the details or reasons, but I do know that my wife and children and friends are richer rewards to me these days than ever before.

Remember Dumbledore’s pensieve? I want one of those – to be able to pour my thoughts out into a bowl and examine them as an observer.

Too often I feel like my mind is full. My default position in times of stress is twofold; I sweep the floors in our house and my mind goes blank. Somehow the cleaning helps and I just have to wait for the fog to clear.

The possibility of joining Harry and watching memories as an invisible observer is so appealing, but like the rest of the saga, it’s too far from reality to translate literally. So I’ll just have to make do with writing self-indulgent blog postings instead.

I’m pregnant with words.

There’s something brewing in here. I was talking to a publisher about writing on grief and she mentioned that they were considering doing something on prayer and loss. I had to duck out of the conversation at that point because I have no solutions or suggestions or tales of success on that particular topic right now. But the rest – the story of how this year has been the hardest, fullest, brightest, saddest year of my life – there are lots of words coming there.

I know how to plan a good funeral.

Honestly, I reckon there’s a niche market out there and the events of this year have fast-tracked me towards some kind of vocational qualification. I’d recommend a bit of Sigur Ros for accompanying music, particularly this:

Filed under: grieving