The Tangle of Change

As I write, speeding grey clouds are tearing across the sheet of the sky, sweeping over the marbled pink varnish, residue of the sinking sun. They seem purposeful these clouds, as if they have somewhere urgent to be, hurrying with luggage to a personal destination.

 Which highlights my own sense of wandering, often in circles, without a foothold in any future I can imagine.

I always find it hard to start blogging again after a long break so the moment I'm living now seems  to be a good jumping off point.  

I'm only just warm enough....my fingers could drain to dead white at any moment. The plumber has been and gone - wonderful man has replaced the pipe under the sink which broke on Saturday, flooding the kitchen floor and all the bottles and baskets full of under-the-sink cleaning stuff.

The whole house still hasn't really warmed up - the heating was off when I got back - frozen pipe the plumber said. No damage done -  I just had to work out how to reset the boiler. And how many jumpers to wear.

 While you in the UK were struggling under a blanket of snow and ice, in Portugal I was under the influence of  thunder storms, gusting winds, drenching rain, high seas, shifting beaches and road rivers.

 Which was all very fitting because reading Patrick O'Malley's marvellous, permission-giving book, Getting Grief Right, took me deeper and deeper into the ocean of my own grief narrative - living without Robin.....which I might not have done if the sun had shone relentlessly.

He quotes Dr Candi Cann, a professor of world cultures who specialises in the studies of death and the human rituals of mourning. She writes that we tell our stories,

"as a way to piece together our narratives of bereavement and to remember those we love.We live in a death-phobic society....there needs to be a counter narrative to society's overarching belief that we are supposed to "get over" people we have lost ...we are supposed to stop grieving and move on....I just don't agree with that. The grief story allows people to have a voice that society is trying to either ignore or silence."

I think that sometimes I have expected myself to get better, to emerge from this dislocated sense of constant unease  -  as if grieving is an illness, a wound that will heal.....that one day I won't be so broken up.... and that I'd better hurry up about it...get on with it so I can have my life back....as if this isn't my real life .....however unrecognisable it is now.

So it's good to hear how other people are doing it. 

Meghan O'Rourke in her memoir about the death of her mother writes,

.....I will carry this wound forever. It's not a question of getting over it or healing. No, it's a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools.

It is too central for that. It is not an emergence from a cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

I feel I haven't even begun to grow roots or branches yet....just sloshing around in the tangle of change.