Viewing category: Grief & healing
Ode to an attic flat
I just read a post by my friend Amy Palko — her husband and three children are about to head off to Australia for six weeks while she stays at home in Scotland working; Amy now faces six weeks of living alone… for the first time in her life. I just tweeted her that it would be “six weeks of awesome” and that living alone is the best thing I have ever done (with an emphatic EVER repeated at the end.) And it’s true. I wouldn’t have chosen to live alone; up until that fateful day in 2005 I’d either been living with family, boyfriends or flatmates. Back then I thought that to be alone would also mean you were lonely, despite knowing it was perfectly possible to be lonely within a relationship. I know that much of my fear was down to abandonment in my childhood, something that never got healed and played itself out again and again as I clung on to relationships that were long past their sell-by date. I had never lived alone; I’d never actually been alone. It was simply unthinkable.
And then, suddenly, there I was, completely on my own.
Somewhere around the beginning of the second year after his death, I was filling my fridge with food for the week, and noticed that everything on the shelves was stuff I liked to eat. Hummous and veggies, and little anchovies in olive oil. There was my favourite yoghurt, and Jarlsberg cheese, and the wine I relied on too much in those days. Every single thing in that fridge was just for me. Hell, even the fridge was mine — I’d bought it in a sale when I moved into the flat. He’d never seen that fridge, yet mingled in with the sadness was a growing sense of freedom and independence that I had never experienced before. The more I nested in that flat, the more me I became.
Five years later and I don’t think much about my fridge anymore. It holds my food and Polaroid film, a small but essential piece of a home I have built around me. One of my greatest pleasures is coming home, locking the door behind me and sinking in my own comfortable space, just me and my sofa, my big bed calling to me as I type a last email into my laptop. The wedding blanket I bought in Marrakesh sparkles in the morning light; a side table rescued from the tip now holds my favourite books. Everything in my home feels like an extension of me, yet even when i go away, i carry that same feeling inside me — that sense of being grounded in my own space, and it helps me navigate the world as a single person.
When Sas came to visit a few weeks ago she walked through the door and let out a sigh: “It smells like your home,” she said, a trace of incense still lingering in the air. And it does, and I love that it does. And yes, one day I hope to be telling you all how hard it is to mix my beloved books with someone else’s, that his guitar or his running shoes or whatever it is that’s important to him are now sitting on my wedding blanket and I’m finding it hard to let go and let someone in, but that I’m trying really hard, because I know it will be worth it.
I look forward to that day very much; but for now I’ll relish the space and freedom I have, because I’ve worked so hard to appreciate it as much as I do.
Have you ever lived on your own? Did you/do you love it?
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Ps. If you’d like to listen to Monday’s call you can now download it over at Fabeku’s place — it was such fun we’re planning to do it again :)
Some important numbers
1. Yesterday, at 5pm GMT, my nephew took his first steps! He is 11 months and eight days old.
2. In seven days I will be sending my manuscript to my editor. Am feeling a leeeetle bit stressed out.
3. Six years ago today the man I loved died from a heart attack; last year’s post said every I feel today. xo
Gratitude
There was a time, not so long ago, when it would have taken me all day to get to the supermarket and buy something for dinner. Much of the day would’ve been spent staring into space; parts were consumed by tears. Around 4pm the wine was opened, the rest of the evening a blur.
I wasn’t an alcoholic – I was grieving.
On Sunday I’m leaving for what is going to be a very full and stimulating two weeks – and I use the word stimulating because everything is going to be brand new – first time in Boston, first time driving to New Hampshire, first time teaching at Squam, first time meeting so many Unravellers and students, first time driving to New York, first time IN NEW YORK! First time meeting my agent and editor – so much going on! The last few days I’ve been stitching together a chapter to send to my editor while preparing the slideshow for my class at Squam – there just so much NEW happening my head is spinning, yet i manage to stay upright somehow. And it’s because i remember the grieving woman who drank wine by the gallon and spent hours trying to leave the house and then cried in the street. I remember how desperate those months were, when I couldn’t bear to speak to people and hid away in my flat for days at a time; when I didn’t know if i could carry on.
When I didn’t want to carry on.
I remember so clearly how wretched that time was, and yet here I am. I survived. And not only that, i am thriving. And today i am so grateful for all that is happening, for all the opportunities i have been given – and the ones i’ve worked hard for too. If he could see me now i know he would be so proud.
And the cherry on the cake? A little boy called Noah. Still being here – carrying on – means i get to be his auntie, and that is truly the best job in the world.
Okay, there are the tears. But they are good tears. Big love to you all xo
The F word
I just read a friend’s very sweet blog post written to her father and it made me smile a wistful smile. I do not know what it is like to have a father in my life because mine left when I was just eleven years old. I’ve seen him four or five times in the intervening 26 years, but that’s it. I do not know him. He emigrated to the other side of the world.
As I sit here trying to write this post I feel so many emotions bubbling in my chest and I have to wonder if i will ever feel okay with what happened. The 11-year-old was bewildered; the teenager was angry; the twenty-something was needy and clung to a relationship, the thirty-something was blindsided by bereavement, hurts from the past following in its wake. But here i am, three years from forty, and i still don’t feel i have healed this hurt; I am still angry about it, more on behalf of the 11-year-old me than me now – me now can look after herself. Me now is an independent woman who feels more fully herself with every day that passes. But there is a little girl inside of me who hurts and i don’t always know how to help her. She will never understand why she was left; she will never understand why he didn’t want to be in her life. As an adult I understand how flawed and fallible we all are, and how becoming a parent doesn’t make you an invincible being who does everything perfectly. I see how the screw-ups of past generations are passed down to each of us, and how we do the best we can with the tools we have; I see how not everybody is cut out for parenthood. But as I near the age he was when he left, i have to wonder how he was able to turn his back on his daughters so easily, choosing to leave the country with another woman.
I guess I will never know the full story, and really it doesn’t matter any more. I worked through a lot of questions with my therapist, but even though i moved through my grief i never fully healed the hurt from so long ago, and i wonder now if i ever will. I do not forgive him. I am still angry in so many ways, more so now when i think about how he missed out on getting to know my sister, and now my nephew. But it is his loss, and the person needing attention from me now is a little blonde girl who’s awkward and unsure of herself; who’s wary of men and yet as the years pass she’ll long for love, long to be ‘looked after’, to be protected. This will never truly manifest, and she’ll discover that the safety she looks for she will eventually create herself. To this day she will not trust the idea of ‘father’ and will not understand the bond a father can have with his daughter. There is a part of my heart that has hardened – I hadn’t realised until this very moment, typing these words.
I don’t wish for a relationship with my actual father, or have any desire to get to know him. I needed a father back then when i was trying to find my place in the world. Now I just wish to find peace in my heart.
Some day.
