I've been thinking about Jill's post a lot this weekend. I was going to record this as a vlog but I lost my nerve. This post is going to be written very quickly, as I would have spoken it, so please bear with me.
Four years. When I whisper "four years ago" to myself it sounds like a long time. When I was 27, 24 seemed unimaginably long ago. But there just doesn't seem to be the same distance between 32 and 29. I can't make it fit.
I feel like one of those poor souls who cannot form new memories, wandering about in a state of permanent amnesia. I wake up every day and I'm vaguely surprised that it isn't 2008. I look in the mirror and think to myself, why am I so sad and wrinkled and flabby all of a sudden? Argh! When did I get a double chin? When did my eyes start to look like raisins pushed too far into dough?
I know it is because four years passed so quickly and I've had three babies and also because I aged ten years at the end of August 2008. Overnight. 29th to 30th of August to be precise. But that knowledge doesn't seem to take, to knit to the part of my brain that keeps track of the present day. So I'm in a constant state of mild surprise.
Simultaneously, I'm also vaguely surprised to find myself looking so young, so unharmed. Because surely it should have made more impression upon me? Surprised. 360. Disconcerting. That woman in the mirror is me. Looking so old. Looking so young.
I am most certainly in the wilderness that Jill has spoken about so perfectly. I flick back and forth between
(a) thinking that I am doing amazingly well and brilliantly and patting myself on the back and making myself congratulatory cups of tea. And I'm here and I have my little fire burning and I have a job and two children here to care for and I'm driving and nappy changing and cleaning up lots of vomit (it's been one of those days here) and I am, on occasion, quite pleased with myself, quite proud of myself. That I didn't just stop when Georgina died. As I thought I might, as I felt I should.
(b) thinking, oh no. Oh no, no, no. I have not changed at all, I have not healed at all, this is just as awful and painful as it ever was. I still sit here with my computer and cry. This is the common theme of my life over the past three years. Computers. Crying. I'm surprised I haven't short circuited the thing by now. I am a slow, slow study and what happened to me and my daughter still seems awful. What happened to you if you read here still seems awful. Because I'm guessing you didn't end up here because you are having the time of your life. And if I know you are there, I've cried over you and yours. Hot, sharp tears. And I would be lying if I said that they weren't for Georgina too. I hope you don't mind sharing. But still. Awful.
I keep waiting for that awfulness, the sharpness, to lessen, to become gentle. So that I can grab it, pin it down and force it into some form of reconciliation with the vomit cleaning and driving bits of my life. But it doesn't seem to want to oblige me. I can't get along with it. And thus I get rained on and my fire goes out and I'm heading back to the woods. To the woods that I know and trust. The woods where my daughter lives. The woods where, increasingly, I choose to live.
Problem is - my other two children don't live there. My husband most certainly does not live there.
So back to the wilderness I go. I clutch at my computer for dear life here. Because if I can't see those other fires I am going to go under. I am so very glad of your company, wherever you stay. In the woods. In the wilderness. Sad. Happy. Accepting. Or not.
And this whole blog seems to be about my attempts to believe in and hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at once. Teaching myself to speak in double speak, to think in double think. Slowly and grindingly and painfully. To live with all three of my children. To be wonderfully, unexpectedly ok and desperately, unhappily not so. I was obviously on to something when I fell in love with that MacNeice poem all those unimaginable years ago. Sixteen year old me. Perhaps she knew something was going to go down in her own life, something along those lines. That poem was on my wall before I ever knew what Louis was on upon. But now I know. Because it is. Incorrigibly plural. Uncomfortable. Unsafe.
I suppose that's the truth. I'm healed. But I was also mortally wounded. Not as deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve. As I am a grave, grave woman. Serious and haunted. Scratched to sadness by the loss of a tiny baby whose life had scarcely begun.
But yet I am alive. Drinking my tea. Burning my fire. Laughing. Miles from the grave. Well, as far as any of us mortals ever are. I find pleasure in food and my children and computer games and conversation and books and friends. Yet I find rest in nothing at all. A farewell to restfulness. Goodbye to all that. Cosy. Neat. Perfect. Content. I have no use for you. Adieu. There is no room for you in a life where I once sat and watched my little daughter die. Even if quite a long time has passed since then.
A multiplicity. I appear everywhere. A success and an awful abject failure. Unable to nail my colours to the mast.
I miss my daughter. My first baby. I miss her terribly. I ache. I yearn. Perhaps this is just where I come to rest, but it isn't comfortable. I often write about the world being at an angle. And it is. That's why I'm here. Gone midnight. Because I don't quite fit. Stuck writing about the same things, time and time again. Because I can't resume my place in the world. Not yet.
As life gets longer, awful feels softer.
Sometimes I think I'm healed, and then I remember the immense-ness of it all. Last night was one of those rememberings - I stopped and looked at what's happened to us in the last 7 months from an outside perspective.
ReplyDeleteHow unimaginable and big and awful this situation is, how hard to be walking in these woods we'd rather not be walking in.
I can't contemplate going through something like this from my guest perspective looking in - it is so mighty, so huge, so life altering. Yet on the inside it is the familiar old shoes that you put on everyday, the pair with the stone that awkwardly pokes you in the foot - almost comfortable and seemingly normal but with just a hint of discomfort.
I'm glad to share tears for all our babies - to cry for others and for ourselves in this place of people that know and understand and give their shoulders freely.
Di xx
"I'm healed. But I was also mortally wounded."
ReplyDeleteOh yes, exactly.
Thank you for writing this <3
"I wake up every day and I'm vaguely surprised that it isn't 2008."
ReplyDeleteMy goodness of all the things you've ever written, this post really hit home the most.
I think because we're the same age, lost our babies the same time and both lost firstborn girls, it just makes me connect with you in a way I don't often with other writers.
Yes to all of this, yes.
xo
Thank you for keeping your fire going - it is such a comfort to read your words, on this blog, on other blogs, on glow. Such a comfort to know that you're there. My fire is burning, too.
ReplyDeleteI have days when I'm doing well. Days when I'm not. I'm over the shock and the "I should be feeling better by now, right?. . ." and just abiding with the gaping hole in my heart. Two to five years, I've heard. Two to five years to integrate the death of a child. I don't know if it ever happens, truly. So I'll make another cup of tea and sit near you.
xoxoxo
You have an amazing ability to get right to the heart of it, this woodsy place of love and grief, where shadows and light constantly shift.
ReplyDeleteI, too, go through times where I pat myself on the back, congratulations given for surviving and sometimes...sometimes even more than that. And yet, nothing has changed, and my computer and this online community remain my lifeline. Like a glow in the woods. Haha (terrible).
Something in me certainly fractured when Molly died, and I'm flailing and confused, trying to make the pieces fit. But they are awkward and sharp.
I relate so much to the concept of a double life....sometimes I even feel like there is another me in a parallel universe, another me who is with another (living) Molly. I wish I could just hop over to that other place, right quick, even just for a minute.
Thinking of you, and missing Georgina with you, dear one. xo
I so identify with living in parallel worlds- and crying over the computer.... because I do the same.
ReplyDeleteAnd the span of time- it has only been a year and four months, and I seem to have aged but at the same time, I feel like I was just pregnant a month ago.
The missing has begun to ebb and flow, lately- I don't cry every day.Some days I don't really even think about the entire thing. I guess that's called healing. Part of me wishes that I was still ill- closer to the point where I held her.
Like MissingMolly I can clearly see myself in a parallel world, where Anja lived and we are the happy family we should be.
ReplyDeleteAnd that you are always 'vaguely surprised that it isn't 2008' - I feel this on a smaller time scale, especially on days like today where I flip the calendar over and think: May?!? How can it be May? It was JUST Christmas and she was here. How can it be May without her?
I can already feel summer coming, and it reminds me that 2008 is never really that far away. It's very strange to feel both healed and broken - I sometimes think that legends got it very wrong and that it was the Fisher *Queen* all along.
ReplyDeleteI'm thankful for the light of your campfire, Catherine. So very thankful.
No, don't mind sharing a bit.
ReplyDeleteYes and Yes to both A and B. Although I keep having these thoughts about the two year mark I will be hitting in slightly over a month - how can it have been two years?
Such a beautiful piece of writing. I get so much of what you say here. The woods. The wilderness. I'm trying to find my balance between the two worlds I live in. My world with Liam and my world without him. I don't fit in my world without him but i'm trying to find my way.
ReplyDeleteI miss my son. My first baby too.
I'm missing Georgina with you.
Love to you Catherine. x
Catherine, I do love you and your writing. Jill's post struk a chord with me, and now this...every word rings so true. I think we've spoken before about how I too am lost in time, thinking it's still 2009.
ReplyDeleteI too have cried over each and every one of you, and for myself, and for Florence, all at once.
Missing Molly, I often imagine a parallel universe in which all my children are alive, often...my 10 year old son made me cry when he told me some physicists do believe there are parallel universes, and it wasn't just my hopeful imagination.
x